Zimarama
by shany94a
Summary: Invader Zim and Gir meet the Planet Express crew from Futurama ... COMPLETED
1. Chapter 1

_I make no claim as to the ownership of characters from either "Invader Zim" or "Futurama". I just love both shows, despite having only recently discovered Zim, and decided to mix them together. Let me know what you think, thanks!_

Space distorted for a fleeting moment as the craft came into view with a blinding light, and then the light faded almost as quickly as it came and all was still and serene.

Except for the yelling.

The purple-and-silver ship that emerged from subspace didn't do so calmly, but instead tumbled over and over as its reaction-control thrusters fired, tiny blue jets straining to level the small vessel out. The screams of its inhabitants could not be heard in the vacuum of space, but would have been deafening to anyone within the cockpit - at least anyone with higher intelligence - until finally, mercifully, the rocket righted itself and began cruising slowly, almost patiently, like a waiting shark sizing up its next meal.

"Gir!" sounded a shrill voice behind the glassed canopy of the Voot Runner. "What just happened? Just what hyperspace coordinates did you use in the navigational computer? Answer me!"

Zim's opaque violet eyes widened, the left one larger than the right and looking as though it would pop free of the socket. His green lower lip curled upwards and quivered in anger, and his thin black arms were crossed above his banded armor as he stared directly at his little robotic companion next to him, the construct lying on its head. The Irken invader knew it would always be an adventure when traveling with his brain-damaged standard information retrieval unit, a gift from the Tallest for his mission to obliterate the Earth, but sometimes it still surprised Zim just how mindless Gir could be.

True to form, the small silver automaton had righted himself and was now absent-mindedly dipping a spicy chicken wing into a small plastic cup of ranch dressing, the android not even acknowledging if he had heard his master. Which he hadn't.

"Who, me?" queried Gir in his singsong mechanically distorted voice, dressing smearing his mouth as he turned to his left, half-moon cyan-colored photoreceptors staring at a fuming Zim. The little droid spoke as though Zim had just asked him an absolutely ridiculous question.

"The coordinates, Gir!" snapped Zim, holding out one hand. "Give me the coordinates that brought us to this - place!"

Gir suddenly squealed with delight, taking Zim totally aback.

"I didn't use coordinates," he continued, the little robot becoming more animated. "I just used a chicken wing! Wee-hooo!"

Sure enough, there it was - a chicken wing dripping with hot sauce and white dressing was jammed into the nav computer's interface, looking dreadfully out of place as Gir flapped his arms up and down in windmill-like fashion, pleased at what he'd accomplished.

"Grrrr," snarled Zim before wearily dropping his head into one hand. The data drive could be fixed, but Gir was tough to take on a good day - and this wasn't shaping up to be one of those days.

The alien twosome had been on Earth for months now and made no real progress towards obliterating the human race, although they had annoyed more than a few people along the way. Zim had chalked it all up to being (almost) alone on a strange new world, and honestly believed that his setbacks were all temporary, that it was only a matter of time before had cleansed the planet of the human filth and laid the planet bare for the Irken armada. At least, that's what Zim hoped he had conveyed to the Tallest in his frequent progress updates, transmitted across the near-incalculable distance of space.

When not making reports to his superiors or devising plans to eradicate humanity, Zim had been working on upgrades to his equipment, particularly the Voot Runner. He had tinkered with its faster-than-light drive earlier this morning, to see if he could make the ship so fast that he could be back at Irk in the proverbial blink of an eye, and theoretically speaking his modifications should have worked. Of course, he had made the mistake of demanding assistance from Gir, and as always, near-disaster had ensued. Not that he'd ever admit it, but Zim wasn't the greatest pilot in the galaxy, and he had concentrated on the ship's controls while ordering Gir to load the hyperspace chicken, er, coordinates. Sometimes Zim wondered why he even kept the android; but once in a while Gir was more-than-capable of following orders, including times where he had stolen cameras or discredited television footage that could have proved that the twosome really were from another planet. Gir also kept Zim company, even if Gir's behavior could go from barely functional to bouncing off the walls in a split second, and if nothing else Zim was glad to have someone from home around as he plotted the downfall of terra filtha - eh, firma.

Zim quickly scanned the space around the Voot Runner through the craft's bubble-like canopy, and it actually seemed like nothing had happened at all. Earth was still there, as big and blue and disgusting as ever, and the Irken emissary shook with rage and revulsion as he looked over the object of his non-affection. He strained his bulbous insect-like eyes into the distance around the planet, looking for something else, and frowned as he failed to find it. He deftly stabbed an index finger at a button on the console before him.

"Computer!" he barked. "Where is my Irken observation platform?"

The platform had been Zim's home away from home on that squalid azure orb far below him, which he had use to observe all inane human traffic in solitude as well as drop the most massive water balloon ever fashioned on that particularly troublesome Earth boy, Dib. Dib, thought Zim angrily ... and then he was pulled out of his furious reverie by the computer's disinterested voice.

"Oh, I don't know," came the weary mechanized reply. "I looked for it, but I can't find it, either."

"What do you mean!" snapped Zim. "How could a piece of advanced Irken technology simply disappear?" he moaned, his voice rising as he finished the last word, his emphasis on the last syllable.

"Don't know that, either," said the computer, bored as ever. "All I know is it's gone. Departed. Forsaken. Can I go now, too?"

"Yes, yes," replied, Zim motioning back and forth with his hand.

"Thank you," intoned the computer, and then all was silent again save for Gir's crunching down yet another chicken wing smothered in sauce and dressing.

The platform - gone? What could have possibly happened, mused Zim? The humans had no way to they could possibly detect it, at least no way that he knew of. He had to notify the Tallest, but the Voot Runner's communications antennae weren't powerful enough to reach the armada, not unless he tapped into his long-range array in the bowels of his small green-and-purple home planetside. Zim pressed another button to link up with his base - and nothing. Just a nervous chitter every time he pressed the button, which became more and more frequent as Zim grew more and more agitated until finally he was pressing the button five times a second before the computer snapped back on.

"Hey, quit it!" shouted the computer. "That hurts!"

"Silence!" bellowed Zim. "Why is the base not responding? Answer me!"

"Uh, 'cause it's not that there, either, chief."

Zim's jaw dropped. The base gone, too! Had those filthy humans found him out? Had Dib been responsible? That ... Dib ...

But no, Zim and Gir hadn't been gone that long, probably just one Earth hour to test the Voot Runner. The humans wouldn't have had near enough time to disable or destroy his home base and his platform - well, maybe the house, but Earth certainly had no capability to destroy the platform, had no space-capable weaponry as far as he had ascertained.

Zim racked his Irken brain for possible explanations, wondering how it had all gone so wrong so fast when suddenly he was jolted out of his contemplation by an emergency klaxon blaring just over his head, filling the cockpit with red light and ear-piercing sound, louder than any screams he or Gir could produce.

"Ahhhh!" yelled Zim. "Stop that infernal noise! What's going on!"

"Intruder alert!" sounded the computer, duty-ready and with no trace of weariness now. "Vessel approaching, zero mark zero, on an intercept course!"

"Let me see!" clamored Zim, waving his arms frenetically. "Let me see! On screen!"

A rectangle of green light materialized, one side at a time, on the inner glass of the cockpit and became a tele-screen, highlighting the newcomer in all its green-shelled glory. The ship was large, perhaps ten times the size of the Voot Runner or even more, and fast, too. It was roughly cylindrical in shape, tapering to a point at the front, with a triangle arrangement of dark green fins set at the rear of the light-green fuselage. There was a yellow circle affixed to either side of the top fin, an emblem of sorts.

"Enhance magnification!" barked Zim, and the logo suddenly came much closer and into sharper focus. It was a name Zim had never seen before, something he had never encountered in all his Irken travels or in all his time on Earth.

Something called Planet Express.

TBC


	2. Chapter 2

"Tactical!" roared Zim, knowing he had to get in the first shot. He was an invader, after all, a proud emissary of the Irken war machine, and not given to simply talking with potential enemies. "Bring all weapons to bear on the intruder!"

The hull of the Voot Runner quivered as its energy weapons powered up, and Zim began pressing buttons and pulling levers, adjusting his targeting sensors on the approaching ship. Static then crackled through his ship's audio receivers, and he adjusted a small dial back and forth until he could make out the incoming transmission.

" ... to identify yourself," queried a soft yet domineering female voice. "This is Captain Leela of the Planet Express Ship ..."

"And Bender!" followed a mechanical tone.

"And Fry!" added an upbeat, moronic tongue.

"Guys, quit it!" snapped the voice called Leela. "Attention, ship, I ask you again to identify yourself. This is ..."

"I AM ZIM!" barked a pompous, overbearing voice from the other end. "You will halt your course and surrender to the Irken armada!"

He had decided to humor himself and talk to the enemy, especially since his weapons weren't fully charged yet and he didn't want to attack at fifty percent power, even if he could detect no energy shielding on the other craft, which had slowed its flight to almost a stop. He wanted tersely for their reply ...

"Ow!" came Leela's pained response. "You want to yell a little louder next time, buddy? I think I can still hear out of one ear!"

"Lucky for you, you've only got one eye to see out of, Leela," chuckled Bender. "It's a perfect match! Ha ha ha ha ha - ow! Oh god, the pain!"

There had been an audible ringing sound, like something soft banging hard against a hollow metal object, and then just silence on the other end until the one called - Fried, was it? - spoke up again.

"Geez, Leela, you didn't have to hit Bender that hard!"

Who were these strange people, thought Zim to himself, his mighty Irken brain analyzing and ascertaining. Had he heard right, that the captain only had one eye and one ear? Was she an alien like himself, or some sort of freakish human? He was almost positive the one called Bender was a robot, but the Fried one sounded human, too - human and stupid and annoying, just like Dib. And ... wait a minute, he had told them to surrender!

"I repeat myself!" barked Zim into his comlink. "I am Zim ..."

"And I'm Gir!" piped up the little automaton in the background, before munching down a tenth chicken wing, the sound more than audible on the other end of the communication to the space delivery crew.

"Quiet, Gir! As I was saying ..."

"Yeah, your name is Dim," shot back Bender mockingly across the void, "and you want us to surrender. Well, Planet Express doesn't surrender to anybody, jerk!"

"Fool!" snarled Zim across space. "It is Zim, and you will pay for your insolence ..."

"Bite my shiny metal ass!" quipped Bender. Gir sat up attentively, spilling chicken wings while wondering what this Bender was really made of - and if he would be tasty ...

"Everybody, put a sock in it!" snapped Leela. "Look, Zim, we just want to talk. We saw you sitting there and wanted to know if you needed any assistance."

Zim was ready to growl another hateful response when he heard a pinging sound and saw a small pink light both going off on his console, indicating his prototype energy cannons, mounted just for this very flight, were fully charged. He smiled, small at first, but then wider and wider, his body beginning to shake, more and more, until finally he was cackling in full megalomanical mode, eyes closed and teeth and tongue fully bared.

"Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! It is you who will require assistance, human filth!" he screamed shrilly, and then depressed the trigger, the Voot Runner's sights locked squarely on the Planet Express ship ...

TBC


	3. Chapter 3

Zim stabbed the fire control and cackled, readying himself to watch the Planet Express ship explode in a shower of sparks after receiving a mighty energy blast from the Voot Runner, and ... nothing.

"What!" intoned Zim, frustrated that he had been denied, and by his own ship. "What is the meaning of this? Why did the cannons not fire!"

He depressed the fire button again and again, but each time it merely lit up and absolutely nothing else happened. The ship's power gauge indicated weapons were fully charged, and other sensors indicated no damage, and yet he couldn't destroy the target waiting right there in front of him, oh so close in front of him.

"Computer!" he shrieked, his irritation knowing no bounds. "Status report!"

He awaited the ship's reply, and then, almost as if on cue, lights began to flicker off in the cockpit, enshrouding Zim and Gir in increasing amounts of shadow.

"Power drain critical!" came the militaristic tone from the computer, as displays functioning normally just seconds before began to go black. Just like the Megadoomer, thought Zim, and he winced at the memory of his having had to self-destruct the most powerful stealth automaton in the Irken military - a robot nothing like Gir, whose eyes were now lit up like flashlights in response to the growing darkness.

"Woooow," mused the little bot, spinning his head around slowly, eye beams breaking up the inky surroundings like an Earth lighthouse, as Zim pounded the ship's controls in frustration.

"I need power!" he screamed. "I need power or I - won't have any!"

The Voot Runner's audio speakers then crackled and Zim suddenly realized that the crew of the other vessel had probably heard everything he had just said.

"Oops," squeaked Zim meekly.

"If you're done trying to destroy us, we're prepared to offer you assistance," said Leela sarcastically.

"Yeah, nice job there, o mighty Invader! Hee hee hee hee!" laughed Bender.

"Silence!" roared Zim, embarrassed and angry, but otherwise pretty much helpless.

"Well, it looks like your ship is having some trouble to us," offered Fry, who was no astro-mechanic by any means.

"There is no trouble!" spouted Zim, trying not to sound exasperated. "I am merely trying to, uh, conserve energy!" He worked buttons and dials and levers, hoping something would snap back to life, but nothing - no weapons, no scanners, nothing except audio communications and life support, and even those were not up to peak performance.

"Look, Zim, do you want a tow or not?" offered Leela, more than a hint of irritation in her voice. "We'll take you back to Planet Express and see if we can help you fix your ship."

Zim ground his teeth together, furious at having to accept aid of any kind, but he knew there was no way he could repair the Voot Cruiser under these conditions. He would take their help at this time, yes, he would take it, but at the first opportunity, these filthy beings would pay for their mockery.

"Oh, how they will pay!" he promised, shaking his fist at the canopy - and then he realized he had said that part out loud.

"Pay for what?" queried Bender, who was always more focused on taking money from individuals rather than giving it to them.

"Oh, uh, nothing," replied Zim quickly. "Very well, humans, I will accept your 'tow'."

"Fine," answered Leela, as Bender scowled at being lumped in with the fleshlings, smoke wafting from his cigar just below the "No Smoking" sign on the bridge.

"Standby for deployment of tow net," added Leela as she tripped a switch on the captain's console and gears and other devices began to hum.

"What is this 'tow net'?" asked Zim nervously, and then he saw the bay doors on the underside of the Planet Express ship open methodically, and a large mesh sack extend downwards on a robotic arm.

"What are you ..." began Zim, and then suddenly the sack shot forward and enveloped the Voot Runner, faster than Zim and Gir could react.

"Ahhhh!" cried Zim as he tumbled head-over-heels to the back of his craft, with Gir along for the ride yelling happily, especially with all his chicken wings and dressing gone.

"Weee-hoooo!" howled Gir with joy, before he impacted against the back of the Voot Runner along with his master, Zim, who dropped flat in the floor, nearly unconscious. For once Zim offered no reproach as the Planet Express ship surged forward with the alien craft trailing behind it, the linked vessels now headed for Earth.

TBC 


	4. Chapter 4

Zim awoke to find himself lying on some filthy floor in some filthy place. He blinked his pupiless violet eyes and looked up to see several hideous faces crowding over him - a one-eyed woman with a long wave of purple hair, a buffoonish-looking human male with angled red hair, a none-too-friendly-looking grey-hued robot, and a dark-skinned human male with peculiarly-shaped black hair. Plus Gir, of course.

"Aw, look who woke up," smiled Gir.

Zim stood up to his full height - which still made him smaller than everyone else except Gir - and brushed himself off. The floor had been none too clean, but he wasn't about go into a germaphobic fit right now in front of all of these strangers.

"Yes, Gir, I am awake," replied Zim with a touch of annoyance. "Now who are you stink people?"

Zim smelled something that didn't agree with him - something like feet - but in truth, all other non-Irken beings gave off odious odors that offended his Irken senses. Part of him wanted to run from these beings, but he would not show them weakness.

"We're Planet Express, mon," offered the black human male, who was better known as Hermes Conrad, company business manager and former Olympic limbo champion. "When it absolutely, positively has to be there - well, one of these days."

"When what has to be there?" queried Zim. Were these beings in the business of trafficking weapons? He quickly scanned the huge landing bay he was in and could discern no trace of military technology, just a table and chairs, some computers and a workshop and the huge green ship he had encountered out in space. The Voot Runner sat below the larger vessel, the tiny Irken craft looking none the worse for wear atop the mesh net that had been used to ferry it to this place.

"Packages, mon," replied Hermes. "Anything you want to ship, we can handle it."

"Good," said Zim, folding his arms defiantly across his small chest. "Then you can ship us back to Earth!"

"You ARE on Earth," corrected Leela, arms folded across her ample chest and signature white tanktop.

"What?" stammered Zim. He thought hard for a second and hazily remembered an alien-looking landscape he thought he saw as he was taken to this place, nothing like the Earth he was used to. Still, he couldn't be sure until he got another look.

"A window!" raged Zim, pointing at the group around him. "Bring me a window!"

"Why don't you just walk over to that one over there, genius?" grumbled Bender, his right thumb pointing over towards the far wall.

Zim grumbled at the mechanical man, even shook his fist at him, but then the invader made his over way to the wall, walking slowly at first until he realized this could take forever with his small steps. He sprinted over to the window and looked out to see the sunlit landscape he thought he had seen before, nothing at all like the dark, foreboding world he had seen on his home away from home.

"What has happened?" questioned Zim, completely mystified. "Where is everything? Where is my base? Where is the skool? Where is ... Dib?"

Zim couldn't believe he had said that last part, but seeing Dib's oversized cranium and hearing his outlandish human voice would have provided him with some small sense of familiarity, if not comfort. This wasn't the world Zim had left behind a few hours ago. This place seemed soothing and antiseptic and almost ... happy.

"Well, I don't know who this Dib is, but welcome to the year 3000, buddy!" offered Fry before downing yet another can of Slurm, the top-selling soft drink of the 30th century. The process to make Slurm was a strange and albeit disgusting one, but it sure didn't stop Fry from drinking it by the gross.

Zim's eyes widened even more, and not at Fry's futuristic soda."Three ... thousand?" he finally managed to blurt out.

"Yep, 3000, shorty," mocked Bender, taking a long puff on his cigar.

Gir looked up longingly at Bender, then suddenly attached himself to the larger robot's leg.

"Are you my daddy?" queried Gir lovingly.

"What? said Bender? "No! Help! Get it off me!"

Bender began shaking his thin cylindrical leg back and forth, trying to dislodge Gir, but the smaller bot simply hung on and enjoyed the impromptu ride.

"Wheeee!"

"Gir!" snapped Zim over his shoulder, looking up and breaking briefly out of his depressed reverie. "Stop fooling around!"

Gir suddenly detached himself from Bender and snapped to attention in front of his master, eyes and chest now colored red as he shifted into duty mode.

"Yes, sir!" replied Gir, saluting, before his color cooled to cyan again and he started punching himself in the head repeatedly.

Zim stared sadly at the floor. He knew he had arrived on Earth in the early 21st century, and he racked his Irken brain to figure out how he could have been slingshotted more than 900 years into the future. Somehow the Voot Runner had been propelled forward in time, and worse yet, he could see no signs that the planet had been conquered by his own people. Hadn't the Irken armada arrived on Earth and taken it over? Hadn't he prepared the way? Had something gone wrong, or had someone else eliminated his race?

Zim would never admit it, but he missed the old Earth. He hadn't really had a chance to destroy it.

"Where are you from, Zim?" asked Leela, in an almost-motherly fashion, of the strange-looking little green being. She saw the bewilderment in his face, remembered how she felt about being a mutant outcast herself, and reached out to put a hand on his shoulder.

"I am Zim!" he hissed, turning on her and causing her to draw back.

"I am a mighty Irken invader and I ... am lost."

He dropped his shoulders and stared again at the floor.

"I am almost a century out of my time and I don't know where I belong."

"Just like me," said Fry, looking sympathetic, his hands in the pockets of his trademark red jacket. "I'm from the 20th century myself, and after taking a cold nap for a thousand years, well, I just woke up here."

"I was on Earth in the early 21st century, human," replied Zim, looking up. "The next thing I know I am here with all of - you," he added

"Poor little guy," said Leela. 'We'd like to help you."

"Just like you helped Zap Brannigan, right, Leela?" joked Bender. He could never resist needling Leela about her one-night stand with Earth's most decorated if incompetent space captain. He started to laugh until he saw the cold stare in Leela's eye, then backed off, massaging the dent in his head that she had given him earlier when he had started in on the subject.

"I swear," she stammered, turning away from Bender and rolling her eye. "You spend just one night with someone, and you never hear the end of it."

"Balderdash!" came an aged voice from behind them. "No one wants to hear about your overblown sexual endeavors, Leela. We've got to help these little fellows get back to where they belong!"

And Professor Hubert Farnsworth stumbled slowly into the room ...

TBC 


	5. Chapter 5

Professor Farnsworth made his way slowly - very slowly - into the Planet Express landing bay. He probably should have been using a cane to help him along, but he wasn't a day over 148 and he didn't think he needed it. 

Zim wasn't impressed, being of a pretty long-lived race himself.

"Who are you, old man?" stated Zim bluntly. The smell was even worse with this aged human, but Zim managed to stifle his gag reflex.

"I'm Hubert Farnsworth, but they call me the Professor," replied Farnsworth proudly as he shuffled to a stop in front of Zim.

"And why do they call you that?" queried Zim, staring intently at the wrinkled old individual.

The Professor looked confused.

"I don't know," he said, and shrugged his shoulders.

"'Cause he is a professor," said Fry. "He invents all sorts of things."

"In-te-rest-ing," replied Zim, rubbing his chin before placing his hands defiantly on his hips.

"Here is how you may serve Zim, old one," he said, no hint of joviality in his tone. "You will establish communications with the Irken armada so that I may make my report and get back to my mission!"

"Irken?" replied the Professor, looking even more confused as a scowl crossed his pruney face and his voice became defiant. "Never heard of them!"

"You dare!" snarled Zim, shaking his open hands towards the ceiling. "Surely you filth have heard of the Irken armada! They must have come here centuries ago!"

"Nope," said the Professor.

"Nuh-uh," said Fry.

"Not that I know of," added Leela.

"Sorry, mon," replied Hermes.

"No such jerks here, Dimmy!" offered Bender, giggling.

Zim swiped up a small sphere from the Professor's work bench and hurled it off of Bender's head, hitting him in his dent.

"Ow!" stammered Bender. "You little jerk! I'll ..."

"You will do nothing, metal man!" shot back Zim, shaking his fist. "I am Zim! And I have had enough of your insolence!"

He hissed at Bender, Zim's long tongue shooting forward like a snake's. But he would not sully himself with this futuristic and inferior mechanical creation.

"Gir!" snapped Zim, pointing to the floor beside him. "Attend me!"

"Yes, sir!" saluted Gir as he snapped into place and shifted into crimson-clad duty mode once more. Just then the main door opened behind everyone, and two crimson claws appeared, followed by the rest of Dr. Zoidberg.

"What's with all the yelling, now?" asked the anthropomorphic lobster physician of Planet Express.

Gir stopped in place, just staring at the newcomer; then he licked his metallic lips and produced a stick of butter from out of his hollow little head.

"Gaaahhh!" screamed Zoidberg, the feelers about his mouth vibrating furiously before he raced back the way he came, the door slamming down behind him.

"Awwww," mouthed Gir, his color returning to normal as he stared at the floor and put the butter stick back in his skull.

"We're not finished yet, greenie!" shouted Bender, breaking off the end of a nearby beer bottle and brandishing it menacingly at Zim.

Zim drew back apprehensively, realizing the vulnerability of his skin to sharp objects; then he growled and suddenly he was positioned higher than anyone else in the room as eight mechanical spider legs extended from his PAK and bore him aloft, the Irken invader dancing left and right on pointed tips before lashing out with one of them to knock the bottle away from Bender. It flew to the floor and shattered into amber-colored shards.

"Wow!" marveled Fry, utilizing his lower intelligence. "Does whatever a spider can!"

A light suddenly went off in the dim recesses of his mind and Fry started humming the old "Spider-Man" cartoon theme to himself.

Unfazed by the loss of his weapon, Bender began rolling up a metallic sleeve.

"Yeah, well, spiders get squashed, too!" he roared, and drew back his fist to smash it into Zim. The next thing Bender knew he was tumbling head over heels to land on his antennae, Zim having reached down deftly with another spidery limb to swipe Bender behind his leg and trip him up.

"All right, that's enough!" shouted Leela as she jumped forward and touched down right in front of Zim. The Irken stared at her directly, his one eye larger than the other, before he decided he didn't take orders from one-eyed females and backhanded her sharply across the cheek with his own hand.

"Sweet manatee of Galilee!" exclaimed Hermes as Zim smiled wickedly at his handiwork. "You shouldn't a done that, mon!"

Before Zim could react, Leela had leapt into the air and was executing a 360 degree spin.

"Hee-yut!"

She cried out and planted her boot into the side of Zim's head to complete her signature spinning roundhouse kick, sending Zim tumbling hard across the bay floor.

"Ooof! Owww! Oooo!" complained Zim as he bounced off the floor once, twice, three times, his spider legs ultimately retracting into his PAK once he came to rest.

"All right, knock it off!" yelled the Professor. "Someone is really going to get hurt around here, and it's probably going to be me!"

He softened his voice and looked directly at Zim though his polarized goggles.

"I'm sorry, Zim, but there's no record of an Irken armada ever having arrived on Earth," he revealed.

"Impossible!" barked Zim as he dusted himself off and regained his feet. "The Tallest had sent me here - there - here to scout ahead! There can be no way that they would not have come to Earth and conquered," he stressed, hands shaking.

"You said you were on Earth in the early 21st century, correct?" mused the Professor, one hand resting on his chin and his other hand tucked under his other arm. "Maybe ..."

"Maybe what, old one?" shrieked Zim, making more motions with his hands. "Tell meee!"

"Well, maybe your people did come to Earth shortly after that, Zim," replied the Professor, "but a lot of records from that era were lost when the Reverend Al Sharpton mutated into a giant blob that ate part of North America."

Zim didn't know who this Al Sharpton was, but it impressed him that a pitiful human, even a mutated one, could devour so much of a planetary body by himself.

"What about broadcasting a communications signal into space, to contact the armada?" said Zim. He hoped that his race had indeed survived, and that he could entrust aid from the descendants of the mighty Tallest.

"Even if you used a familiar frequency, it could take forever for your people to receive it and respond, in which case even I'd be long gone," stated the Professor. "Why, it took a thousand years for a television signal from Fry's time to reach Planet Omicron Persei VIII, and then they got all angried up and came here to destroy the Earth and long story short, they obviously didn't."

"A thousand years," said Zim to no one in particular. He couldn't wait another thousand years!

"Not to worry, my little green friend," said the Professor as he shuffled over to Zim and placed a leathery hand on his armored shoulder, still causing Zim to flinch slightly. "I'll figure some way to help you out of your dilemma. In the meantime, with your knowledge of and experience with space travel, you could prove an asset to our Planet Express team!"

The others in the room just gaped at the Professor and then started to protest, especially since Zim seemed to be a genuine extraterrestrial conqueror, but Farnsworth shushed them all down, believing he had secured yet another source of cheap labor. He smiled sweetly at Zim, who stared silently with an upturned lower lip at his ancient benefactor, the Irken weighing his options. He quickly made up his mind, feeling he could use these future people to further his own ends.

"You smell, old one," he said bluntly, "but I accept your terms. Planet Express is now home to Ziiiimmm!"

TBC


	6. Chapter 6

_Little bit longer chapter, so bear with me. - S._

Zim sat back in his seat on the good ship Planet Express ship and scowled. He hated being a passenger! He was used to flying his own ship, but on this vessel, Leela was the captain, and the captain got to do the flying.

I will bide my time, thought Zim, oh yes, I will bide it until the ship and all its crew belong to me. He began to smile, just a small grin at first, but then his mouth opened wider. His small body began to tremble, imperceptible at first, then more and more, until finally he was shaking all over and cackling hysterically, his violet eyes closed and his handful of peg teeth and long thin wiry tongue fully extended.

"Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha!"

He then looked up and noticed that everyone was staring at him, and he froze in place.

"Just ... clearing my throat," he said.

"Well, keep it down," said Leela. "For a little guy you sure are loud!"

Zim shot her a dirty look but said nothing, and he leaned back in his seat, bored out of his Irken mind. So far this Planet Express gig had been nothing to write home to Irk about for someone used to conquering planets - or at least, making the effort to conquer them. He had "destroyed" Mars by knocking it out of its orbit and had made it his goal to do likewise to Earth, but that would never happen so long as he was stuck here in this place with these people. Perhaps he could ...

"All right, we're coming up on our last stop today," said Leela, snapping Zim back to the present. "Let's get ready to drop our stuff off and go home."

Zim sat up in his chair, straining to get a better look through the main view-screen, and he saw they were coming up on - a house. A typical yellow Earth-like house set atop a small asteroid, along with other houses situated on other asteroids; and in front of the first house on the left was a large, green, gelatinous blob. The blob was moving, and it had a face, and a hat, and as far as Zim could tell, with enhanced magnification, it didn't look happy.

"Aw, not this guy again!" moaned Bender, looking out a porthole. "Bad enough I had to share my beer with him at the hospital!"

"Hey, you offered it to him," said Fry, leaning back in his own chair. The individual in question had sampled some of the crew's homemade brew a while back, after his guilt got the best of him over an incident with Hermes and the Professor that had involved all their respective offspring.

"Yeah, but that didn't mean I liked sharing it," said Bender, chomping away on a cigar.

"Who is - this guy?" queried Zim, rubbing his chin and peering fixedly at the monitor.

"Mr. Blob," answered Leela, still working the ship's controls, with disdain in her voice. "He's not the nicest guy in the world. He beat the crap out of the Professor and Hermes once, just because he was in a bad mood. He apologized and all, but personally, I still don't like him."

"Perhaps he does not like you, either," muttered Zim under his breath, or so he thought. Fry overheard Zim and started to snicker, but stopped when Leela glared at him over her shoulder.

"Let's just drop our package off and get the hell out of here," she said. "Zim, you and Gir can go down there and get Blob to sign for this."

She spun and tossed Zim a small padded envelope with more than a little force, striking him square in the gut. Apparently she didn't like Zim, as well.

"Ow!" cried Zim, clutching his abdomen. "My squeedily spootch!"

"Ha ha ha ha ha ha!" laughed Bender, pointing at Zim, who by now had fallen out of his chair in pain. Gir probably should have been helping his master out, but he was having too much fun with wealthy Planet Express intern Amy Wong to notice. For whatever reason, Gir was wearing his felt-stitched, Frankenstein-like green dog suit while Amy fussed over him.

"You're just the cutest thing!" cooed Amy. "Can you show me any tricks?"

"Only if you dance with meee," replied the disguised bot in a singsong fashion, and then they both took up the back half of the bridge with their impromptu boogie routine, moving and motioning, and Gir even moonwalking.

"Doo-dee-doo-dee-doo-dee-doo!" he chimed happily.

Zim managed to get to his knees, albeit painfully, and although his organs ached, his mouth was as capable as ever.

"Why ... cough ... why me and ... cough ... Gir?" he protested. "Why not ... send ... cough ... the Fry monkey?"

"Hey, I handled the last delivery!" argued Fry, sitting up in his seat. Fry, being naturally lazy, was exhausted after dropping off an entire business-size envelope at the previous stop, and he knew he needed to rest.

"You heard him, Zim," stated Leela. She knew Fry was next-to-useless, but even more than that, she really didn't want Zim on her ship. Maybe she could leave the newcomer and his bot behind, she thought briefly; but no, the Professor would probably give her a load of guff when they got back, especially if his bowels had been acting up. She sighed and began to slow the ship, readying it for a stop.

"Get ready, Zim, we're just about there," said Leela, tapping the brakes and decelerating the house-sized vessel.

"Fine, Cyclops female," grumbled Zim, already adorned in his dark purple Irken armor built for deep-space survival. He stabbed a button on his wrist with a pointed finger and instantly a transparent bubble briefly enclosed his green head before shimmering out of view, sealing his life support against the impending vacuum.

"Gir!" snapped Zim, not even looking over his shoulder. "It's time to go, Gir!"

Gir just kept dancing with Amy, both of them now starting the Electric Slide.

"GIR!" shouted Zim, spinning around towards the stern. "Move it or lose it!"

Gir immediately stopped what he was doing and stood up straight.

"Okey-dokey!" he replied, before stepping out of his doggie disguise and kicking it off to the side. He then quickly ambled over to Zim's side as the ship came to a smooth halt. The front landing gear with its embedded staircase lowered to the edge of the nearest asteroid, and then the Irken duo passed through the airlock and bounced down the stairs and into space, Zim carrying the package under one arm.

"Well, it's about time you got here!" scowled Mr. Blob, standing on his porch with his pseudopodia crossed in front of him as Zim and Gir made their way up his walk. He didn't appear pleased, but it was hard to tell since he was composed entirely of translucent green protoplasm, and wearing a fedora hat.

"I've been waiting all day!" he continued. "What the hell takes you losers so long?"

"Silence your sniveling, jelly man!" barked Zim, who wished he was back on the filthy Planet Express ship rather than making another useless outdoor delivery during this, his trying first week of work. "We are here now!"

"Well, let me have it already!" growled Blob.

Zim wished he could let Blob really have it with his armor's on-board arsenal, but that would probably be frowned upon by the company, and he believed he still needed their help to get back home. He flipped the package towards Blob, and zero gravity did the rest as the envelope floated into his gelatinous hands.

"Now you must sign for ..." started Zim, detaching a scanner and light pen from his belt, but Blob had already ripped the envelope open. "Hey, you were supposed to sign first!"

"What the hell?" complained Blob, ignoring Zim's words. "It's broken!"

He reached in and pulled out a small white dragon statuette, with wings and scales and tail, and a jagged edge where a neck and head should have been.

"Pity for you," poo-pooed Zim, just wanting to get back on the ship. "Sorry, but we just deliver the stuff! Try some glue, you'll be fine!"

"No, take it back!" shouted Blob, and he launched the statue at Zim, who caught it on the fly and hurled it back.

"No, you take it!" retorted Zim.

Blob made the catch and then the return toss.

"No, I said you take it!" yelled Blob again, but this time the statuette bypassed Zim and clonked off of Gir, who fell over.

Zim went ballistic.

"You dare attack an automaton of the Irken elite!" raged Zim, hands shaking in fury at his customer.

"Yeah, I dare!" said Blob, and he laughed long and hard at the tiny beings in front of him, fueling Zim's rage even more.

"Too bad for you, pip-squeak, but if you don't like it, then you can just kiss my as-"

Mr. Blob never finished his sentence, as a small cylinder situated above Zim's left shoulder suddenly ignited with a bright, thin orange beam of light that sliced Blob all the way down his left side, leaving a pool of burnt-edged gelatin lying there on the porch.

"Ahhhh!" cried Blob, who rushed back inside his home to regenerate his lost "limb". He slammed his front door and shut all the window blinds before turning off his lights, like a homeowner who didn't want trick-or-treaters on Halloween.

"Wah ha ha ha ha!" cackled Zim with delight at having conquered yet another foe, while Gir sat back up, none the worse for wear.

"I'm gonna have me some jello!" squeaked the droid, as he whipped out a spoon and began lapping up the remnants of Mr. Blob. The twosome then made their way back up the ramp and into the Planet Express craft.

"What the heck just happened out there?" asked Leela angrily, having seen the whole thing on a closed-circuit monitor whose sound was broken. "You're not supposed to shoot the customers!"

"He fired the first shot!" replied Zim, deactivating his invisible headgear and shedding his bulky armor. "I acted in the manner of a true Irken soldier and vanquished the enemy! Victory for Zim!"

"Oh, just go sit in the back!" snapped Leela. She didn't know how she was going to explain this one, with Planet Express now opening fire on its customers. Zim eyed her curiously, even angrily, but after one week he knew nothing he could say would make her lighten up; besides, he was still heady with triumph. He tromped to the back of the bridge, Gir beside him, and sat down regally. Fry and Amy sat there staring a bit anxiously at Zim, who been mouthy before, but had never done anything this drastic.

Bender was another story.

"Great job, Zim!" laughed Bender. "I know we haven't really got along, but that was beautiful, buddy! Have a beer!"

He reached into the galvanized silver pail he kept by his station and handed a cold frosty brown glass bottle to Zim.

Zim blinked, wondering what to make of this gift since Bender had already tried to cut him with one earlier in the week. He took it tepidly, still not sure if this was a trick, and shrank a bit from the cold, but then he felt he liked being honored this way. He had already tried Slurm this week, so why not Benderbrau?

"It was nothing," said Zim matter-of-factly.

"Well, you sure put that Blob in his place!" replied Bender, and clinked his bottle against Zim's, which was still unopened and began to froth within.

"No, he didn't!" snapped Leela as she put the ship on auto-pilotand got up from her chair. She then walked steadily towards the stern of the ship, headed straight for Bender and Zim.

"All he did was manufacture bad publicity for us when word of this gets out! Who's going to want to hire a delivery company that might take a shot at them?"

"He started it - and I finished it!" yelled Zim.

"Well, as far as I'm concerned, Zim, that only thing that's finished is you making delivery runs with us!" shouted back Leela.

Zim stared at Leela, then at his bottle, and a malicious smile began to cross his lips as he shook the bottle up and down and then began to point it towards a surprised Leela.

"Don't you dare …"

Too late. Zim deftly twisted off the metallic cap and showered Leela smack dab in the face with golden foam, soaking her hair and tanktop before directing the last of the stream at the floor around her.

"Aggghh!" she cried, trying to wipe the foam from her eye. "Why you little …"

Suddenly she was airborne, her boots having slipped on the sopped deck, and she fell heavily to the floor, nailing her head on a nearby console as she went down and knocking herself cold.

"Oh no! Leela!" cried Fry as he jumped from his chair to cradle the woman he loved but had had problems getting close to. She was unconscious, with a nasty bruise flowering on her forehead, but she was still breathing normally.

"Why'd you do that, Zim?" asked Fry, looking up, his face a mixture of anger and bewilderment

"Silence!" snapped Zim. "My bottle was too full of foamy stuff to contain. More importantly, the captain is now incapacitated, and the ship needs a new captain!"

He paused for a second, then raced towards the captain's chair.

"I choose me!"

The controls weren't difficult to master, and soon Zim had the Planet Express ship hurtling at breakneck speeds towards Earth, the Invader laughing and cackling all the while. This was where he belonged, in command of a starship, not dropping off its packages as a delivery boy!

"More speed!" screamed Zim, even though the ship was already going frighteningly fast. "More speed! Bender robot, push some buttons! Amy human, pull some levers! Ah ha ha ha ha!"

Everyone else was hanging on for dear life, with Fry holding on to Leela. Maybe this hadn't been such a good idea after all, thought the crew, except for Gir, who was beatboxing on the ship's intercom as Zim maintained his mad dash.

Soon the ship was scraping against Earth's atmosphere and blazing through re-entry before homing in on its final destination in New New York …

_(Cue the opening shot of every episode of "Futurama", where we get a close-up of the Planet Express ship rocketing along above a 30th century city's transportation tubes. The ship then dips to the right and swerves back up to the left before crashing headfirst into a huge outdoor telecommunications screen and getting stuck there. If you ever wondered just who was flying the ship that badly, well, now we all know!)_

TBC


	7. Chapter 7

"What happened?" shouted Professor Farnsworth in the Planet Express landing bay, the aged scientist quivering with anger. "Where's my ship, Zim?"

Zim walked right by the Professor, waving his hand back-and-forth in a dismissive fashion while not even bothering to look at the old man.

"I parked it outside," he said matter-of factly. "It's fine!"

"You parked it?" stammered the Professor, now almost beside himself with fury. "Who the hell let you drive?"

"The captain was incapacitated, and so naturally I assumed command," retorted Zim, as if the Professor should have assumed that course of action.

By now Zim had made it to the table at the far end of the Planet Express landing bay and was scanning its contents. All that effort had made Zim hungry. He couldn't stand human food back in the 21st century, but for some reason the 30th century fare hadn't been so menacing. Less filth, he surmised. He had sampled a crumb here and there, but now he felt he wanted a little more. He looked and looked until finally his violet-hued eyes dilated as they fixated upon - a waffle.

Gir had made him waffles once, albeit out of unorthodox ingredients; still, Zim had actually liked them. In fact, he thought he had seen Gir making this particular batch earlier today, and Zim figured he'd at least give them a try.

Zim reached out and picked up the nearest waffle, then tore half of it away with his peg teeth. He chewed and swallowed, swallowed and chewed.

"Mmmm," he mouthed, obviously enjoying himself. "Mmmm, snack!"

"Where the hell's my ship, Zim?" repeated the Professor far behind him, the aged scientist now shaking his fists at his newest employee.

"Iss inna scween owtsyde," mumbled Zim over his shoulder, a generous helpful of waffles still filling his mouth.

"What?" shouted the Professor again, a bit hard of hearing at a century-and-a-half old.

"He said it's in a screen outside," corrected Fry, who had more than enough experience talking with his own mouth full, as he walked in. He had a perturbed look on his face as he braced Leela with his left arm and walked her over to the conference table before sitting her down as gently as he could.

"Thanks, Fry," said Leela as sweetly as she could, even though she was still a bit groggy from the incidents aboard the ship. She smiled up at him, and Fry smiled down on her, happy he could help the girl of his dreams; then he looked up at Zim and scowled.

"This guy is a menace, Professor!" shouted Fry as he pointed at Zim at the far end of the bay, just as Hermes walked into the room. "Zim shot up Mr. Blob, flew the ship like crazy, and probably gave Leela a concussion, too!"

"What about Mr. Blob?" asked Hermes a tad fearfully, still smarting from the beating he and the Professor had received at Blob's pseudopodia all those months ago. Hermes shivered a little bit, remembering all the weeks he had then spent inside a full body cast.

"Yes, pray tell what about our old friend, Mr. Blob?" inquired the Professor, shifting from angry and cantankerous to doting and anxious in the span of seconds.

"Zim shot him with a laser - thingy - and burned half of him off!" spat Fry, still pointing and scowling at Zim, who kept right on cramming waffle into his gullet. Obviously Zim hadn't shot that much of Blob off, but Fry was too angry to fawn over the details.

Hermes and the Professor both looked blankly at Fry, turned to look at one another, and then bust out laughing at their old nemesis' fate. Fry, though, was still pointing at Zim, and now Leela was scowling at Zim as well.

"He IS dangerous, Professor!" she stated, a bruise the color of her hair situated just off to the right of her eye. "Zim shot up a customer, he conked me in the head, and to top it all off left the ship stuck outside! Lord only knows what he'll do next!"

"I did NOT 'conk' you," retorted Zim as he spun about indignantly, his mouth finally free of waffles. "I merely offered the one-eyed female a drink, and she lost her balance and hit her head! Luckily I was there to steer the ship to safety!"

"You little jerk!" shouted Leela. "You sprayed me in the face and knocked me out, and then you flew the ship so crazily that you could have gotten us all killed!"

"Weren't you un-con-scious while I was expertly piloting the ves-sel?" shot back Zim, pointing at Leela like an admonishing attorney grilling a witness in court.

"Ooooo!" she managed to get out before spinning away in her seat, knowing this argument was hopeless, and just not wanting to look at Zim anymore.

"I thought so," said Zim, smiling with his eyes closed, before turning away and climbing up onto the worktable and lying down on it. He hadn't really been paying rapt attention to anyone else's criticisms - certainly not Fry's - and had decided it was time for an impromptu nap. Piloting a starship like he did was tiring work.

"Grrrr," managed Fry, not able to think of anything else to say in his anger as Zim began to doze off.

"Hey bub, what's all the hub-bub?" intoned Bender as he finally made his way back to headquarters. He had stayed behind to finish off a few beers before contacting the city's public works division and informing them they should probably try to salvage the Planet Express ship.

Fry didn't even look at Bender, but just kept staring hatefully at Zim.

"I am so mad at Zim right now, Bender" he started, "that I ..."

"Well, that's nice," said Bender without any pretense of interest, and then he proceeded to walk towards the Professor, who was still giggling along with Hermes about Mr. Blob's misfortune.

"By the way, Professor, here's the bill from the city for getting the ship down," said Bender, as he handed his employer a folded piece of paper. The Professor opened it up and nearly choked when he saw the numerical figures within.

"Gaahh!" the Professor managed to blurt out. "150,000 quatloos to return the ship? I don't have that kind of money!"

"Naw, that's just the cost of removing it from that screen and getting it on the ground," corrected Bender as he lit up a cigar. "Towing it back here is gonna be extra."

The Professor began to turn a shade of red that almost matched Dr. Zoidberg's skin color. Hermes patted his friend's back and tried to calm him down before the Professor suffered a stroke.

"Oh well," remarked Bender, back to concentrating on himself. "Hey Fry, I was thinking that to save on rent, maybe we could have Zim and Gir move in with us!"

Fry's eyes went as wide as dinner plates.

"What!" he stammered, turning to look at his mechanical friend. "Bender, you can't be serious!"

"Sure I can," replied Bender. "Think about it, Fry - we'd cut our rent in half and have more bucks for booze and stuff! Lord knows you got more than enough room in your closet!"

Gir, dressed as a green dog again, had made his way back with Amy by now and had overheard Bender's proposal.

"You got a TV?" he queried the bigger bot.

"A big TV, little guy," promised Bender. "A big TV!"

"Wowwww," said Gir dreamily, musing on how much bigger televisions were in the 30th century.

"No way, Bender!" snapped Fry. "You don't even like Zim!"

"Well, not at first," admitted Bender, taking a puff on his cigar. "But after seeing him take out Blob like that, I gotta say the kid's got style!"

Zim made no response. He was fast asleep, like a newborn Irken smeet, on the table in back.

"No, Bender!" protested Fry again. "No way! Sorry, but I'm putting my foot down!"

And so Fry did - and then his foot went right through the floor, and he sank all the way down to his thigh. Apparently the Planet Express place needed some repairs.

"Oooowww!" Fry cried out while trying to pull himself out, with no luck.

"Damn it!" shouted the Professor, shaking his fists again. "I don't have money for that, either!"

The Professor looked like he was about to explode - or fall asleep. He had been known to do both in the past, but this time his angry blood got the best of him.

"That does it!" he added, looking over to the spot where Zim was snoring contentedly. "Zim has got to go!"

TBC 


	8. Chapter 8

_Last update for a little bit - got some things to take care of, but should be back soon. Enjoy! - S._

Invader Zim woke up a few hours later on the back table at Planet Express to find everyone sitting around staring at him – and no one had a smile on their face. Well, Gir did, but Gir often wasn't all there to begin with. If looks could kill, the looks from the Planet Express people would have annihilated the Irken soldier where he sat.

Leela sat there with her arms folded across her chest, as did Fry, Bender, the Professor, Hermes and Amy. Dr. Zoidberg sat there a tad nervously, hoping Gir wouldn't whip out a stick of butter again and try to make him into lobster bisque or some other dish. Gir, though, was too busy munching on a king-size chocolate bar to consider Zoidberg as a second course.

"Ah, what a glorious rest!" said Zim, yawning and stretching his arms over his head before sitting up and finally looking at everyone around him, all of them still looking highly irritated.

"What's wrong with you stink people?" asked Zim, not really caring to know. He just liked hearing his own voice.

"What do you think?" snapped Leela. She wanted to kick Zim in the head again, if only hers didn't hurt so much from the blow she had sustained aboard the ship.

"What?" replied Zim, flabbergasted. He looked past Leela to see the Planet Express ship was back in the bay, looking the same as always except for a few broken windows and some metallic scarring along the green nose that revealed the bare metal underneath.

"This ship is fine, it just needs some paint!" stated Zim, waving his hand. "What is everybody else so upset about?"

"Sweet gorilla of Manila, we're upset because you're a danger to us all, mon!" offered Hermes from across the table. "Ya have absolutely no regard for anyone else's health or safety, and it's a wonder we still have a company after a week with you!"

"Yeah, you're a menace, Zim!" said Fry, his eyes growing larger. "The longer you stay, the more we're in danger - and I've flown with Bender!"

"Hey!" spouted Bender, blowing a cloud of cigar smoke towards Fry, who started coughing.

"I'm afraid we're going to have to ask you to leave, Zim," said the Professor directly, his hands folded in front of him. "I can't afford to have you destroy everything I've built up!"

Zim looked around nervously, starting to sweat a little bit as he often did back on 21st century Earth when he was confronted by others. At least he wasn't wearing those stupid scratchy contact lenses or that stupid pointy wig - aliens and androids were so commonplace on 30th century Earth that hardly anyone outside Planet Express had given Zim or Gir a second glance these last seven days.

Zim's anxiety, though, increased as someone else entered the room - an executioner, perhaps? - and he wished his pimply friend Pustulio, a zit that had taken on an identity of its own, were here for support. Too bad he had popped long ago.

The mysterious figure, still shrouded in shadow, came even closer, and Zim went on the attack verbally as his irrational fears got the best of him.

"Who are you?" shouted Zim, pointing at the trespasser.

"Ah'm …" started the newcomer.

"Who are you?" repeated Zim.

"Ah'm …"

"Who are you?"

"Ah'm Scruffy, the janitor," said the little-seen Planet Express handyman, who sat down complacently at the table, propping up his legs and resting his hands behind his head.

"Good thing you're here, Scruffy," said the Professor. "You can help fix the damage Zim did to the ship!"

"Ah'm on break," replied Scruffy, pulling out a magazine and starting to read it.

"Damn it!" retorted the Professor, who then promptly fell asleep and began snoring.

"So," said Zim, rising up and placing his fists on his hips, his confidence renewing as he saw that the one called Scruffy posed no viable threat. "You think you can just get a member of the Irken elite to - pack up and go?"

"Pretty much," replied Leela, getting up from her chair, as did the others except for the still-snoring Professor and the still-reading Scruffy. Zim's nervousness began to return as he felt himself surrounded now, and he looked around frantically for an escape route before spying a small space between Amy and Zoidberg. Instantly Zim extended his spider legs from his PAK and darted off the table past the intern and the physician.

"Gir, to me!" cried Zim as he made his way to the center of the launch bay by the Planet Express ship. Gir just sat there, oblivious, still polishing off his chocolate treat.

"Gir! Extraction, Gir!" yelled Zim again as the other figures in the room turned and began advancing on their unwanted guest. He'd have to return for the Voot Runner, but for now Zim felt he needed to escape.

Gir dropped his empty candy wrapper and spun about, his coloration altering to red as he ignited the thrusters in his feet and jetted towards his master. He didn't slow down when he reached him, either, nearly knocking Zim over as he grabbed his master at full speed and rocketed straight towards the exit door - which refused to budge, the impact knocking both Zim and Gir unconscious ...

Zim awoke much later in some sort of closet to find himself bound head-to-foot with some filthy sort of string. Gir lay next to him, also bound, but smiling in his sleep. Not much bothered the little bot, except when the fridge was empty or the cable TV was on the fritz. Zim scowled and struggled against his bonds, but they didn't budge. He wondered if he would be executed as a prison of war, although he had neither heard nor made such a martial declaration in his time here in this century. The people of Planet Express, though, would pay dearly for this indignity - oh, how they would pay!

Zim could still feel his PAK attached to him beneath his bindings; it had to be there, or else his body would have collapsed into emerald dust only ten minutes after it had been removed. The PAK held his sensory array, communications gear, life support system, field database and all his high test scores, and it had never failed to get him out of a jam before. It would not fail him this time, either, and he smiled wickedly as a sharp-edged spidery limb ripped through the metallic mesh hobbling him. Victory for Zim - and woe to Planet Express ...

But first he had a call to make.

TBC


	9. Chapter 9

Sorry for the wait, all, here we go again. - S.

Zim extended a second spider leg from his PAK and deftly shredded Gir's bonds in one swift motion, having already freed himself in a similar fashion.

He couldn't detect any surveillance activity in the room, not any other hi-tech gear, and he surmised that Leela and Fry and the others had really just put him and Gir in an ordinary storage closet. The filth, he thought angrily. He shook his fist, and then returned to the matter at hand.

"It's time to get up, Gir!" hissed Zim, trying to keep his voice down lest the Planet Express people hear him.

The little bot rolled over and stirred uneasily.

"But I don't wanna get up yet, mommy!" he whined, sulking in his sleep like a petulant six-year-old.

"We have to get out of here, Gir!" snapped Zim, a little louder this time. He reached out with a black foot and gave Gir a nudge. No response.

"Now, Gir!"

Gir sat up uneasily, sleep still weighing heavily on his photoreceptors, the automaton looking more like a human child who didn't want to go to school.

"Okey-dokey," he mumbled wearily, and then stood up to his full height, which wasn't all that high to begin with. He rubbed one small hand across his little silver-and-cyan face, trying to return to normal status.

Zim unfolded a comprehensive microphone from the PAK after drawing the spider leg back in; then he extended a semi-rigid polymer cable into a nearby power outlet mounted on the wall. It was something Zim had wished to try all week, but hadn't for fear of arousing suspicion. Now that the Planet Express monkeys desired to be rid of him, though, there was no point in holding back. The mike's limited range would be boosted by the internal power via the outlet, and Zim would piggyback his signal off of the satellite dish mounted on the roof of the strange red complex that he had called home for the past week.

"Calling the Irken Armada," he whispered into the mike, which was attuned to his standard transmission frequency. "Invader Zim reporting. Are you there, My Tallest? Zim to Irk, respond."

No answer. Zim had asked the Professor for help earlier in the week in contacting his race - well, maybe he had ordered more than asked - but was told trying to contact his race would be a futile effort. Apparently they didn't know who they were dealing with, or just how tenacious an Invader could be.

"Calling the Irken Armada," he repeated. "Invader Zim reporting."

He felt a slight wave of despair, but he quickly pushed it back down into his organs. The Tallest had almost assuredly not lived this long, unless their snack supplies had held out, but he felt certain he could contact their descendants or whoever ruled Irk now. He refused to believe that the Irken race had failed to survive. Maybe they had bypassed Earth, but he absolutely believed they were still out there somewhere.

Still, though, just radio silence. He wondered if he should make a try for the Voot Runner; but no, his newfound enemies would be waiting for him outside.

"Come in, My Tallest," asked Zim once more. "This is Invader Zim. Please respond."

Nothing. Not a chime, not even a beep. He looked over at Gir, still standing there sleepily, and then stared sadly at the floor himself. They really were all alone, mused Zim. No Armada, no Irkens, no Tallest, no ...

Static suddenly crackled over Zim's communications array, lightly at first, then growing louder, just as a small vid-window popped up from Zim's PAK and cast its greenish pall on a nearby wall.

"Hello?" came a slightly aged but still lucid voice, like someone who was a tad hard of hearing but still possessed most of their mental faculties. "Who is it?"

"Hello, My Tallest?" queried Zim hopefully. The video was grainy, but it started to clear up as Zim adjusted a dial on the mike. He though he could make out one tall figure - no, two - standing there, both of them shrouded mostly in shadow, but with slightly luminescent eyes. Each figure also had different colored eyes.

"Who is it, again?" spoke another voice, different from the first one. It had to be the other figure.

"It is I, Invader Zim!" said Zim proudly, as if heralding his own coronation.

A brief interlude of silence punctuated the other end of the transmission, followed by anxiety and downright disbelief.

"No," sounded the first voice. "It can't be!"

"Oh, no," echoed the second. "No, no, no!"

"My ... Tallest?" quizzed Zim, confused, as he rotated the dial to achieve better video focus. The two figures were still mostly ensconced in darkness, but he could clearly make out red eyes on one and purple orbs on the other. And long white – hey, were those beards?

"Uh, no, they're not here," replied the first voice, the red-eyed one, in a rushed fashion, as if he was trying to avoid a conversation.

"Yeah, better luck next time, Zim!" came the second purple-eyed voice - then some blurred motion and a slapping sound, as if the figure was trying to cover its mouth over something it had said.

"Don't say his name!" snapped the other figure.

"What is going on here?" roared Zim, frustrated at not getting any straight answers. "Who are you? What is the meaning of this? Answer Zim!"

"Well, it's too late now," whispered the second voice, seemingly resigned to its fate.

"Greetings, Invader Zim," added Tallest Purple, now moving into view, complete with full beard and more than a hint of disdain in his tone.

"My Tallest!" beamed Zim. Finally something, someone, was familiar to him in the 30th Century!

"Where are you now, Zim?" asked Tallest Red wearily, also bearded, while hoping that Zim was still on Earth and far away from them.

"I am still fighting the good fight on Earth, My Tallest," replied Zim. "Earth in the - well, the 30th Century, that is."

"How'd you get - here?" asked The Tallest in unison.

"Took a wrong turn in the Voot Runner, went through some kind of spatial warp, nothing I can't handle," said Zim, shaking his hand up and down matter-of-factly before launching into an inquisition mode.

"What happened to the Irken armada?" he pleaded. "Why was Earth never conquered? Did I not pave the way for annihilation of the humans? Tell meee!" He shook his hands furiously about him.

"Well, Zim," started Tallest Red, sounding like he was straining for the words. "We ... lost contact with you back in the 21st century and I guess we just ... forgot all about Earth."

"Yeah, we just forgot," added Tallest Purple. "We got busy conquering other planets elsewhere. Sorry about that!"

Zim blinked absent-mindedly at the vid-screen. A mighty Invader had disappeared and they just - forgotten? But why? How? What for?

And then it dawned fully on Zim, something he had suspected all week but couldn't confirm until now - that if he couldn't have done the job of overthrowing that filthy blue globe, then no one could have. The reason why Irk had never enslaved Earth was that Zim had not been there to properly prepare the planet. No wonder those filthy Planet Express fools had never heard of the Irken Armada!

It was clear to Zim what he had to do - what he had been born to do.

"I've got to get back!" he blurted out. "Back - to the future!" he finished, pointing straight at the vid-screen and holding his point.

"You mean, the past," corrected Tallest Red sarcastically.

"Past, future, one of those," retorted Zim. "I have to get back to 21st Century Earth and prepare the way for the Irken in-VA-sion!"

The Almighty Tallest nearly choked on their omnipresent snacks. Life had been so peaceful for almost 900 years A.Z. (After Zim) ...

"Thank you for helping me to refocus on my mission, My Tallest," said Zim proudly, fists now on his hips. "I will make every endeavor to prepare the way for the Armada! Of course, when I get back there, you will have no recollection of this conversation, since obviously it will not have happened - yet."

"Whatever, Zim," sighed Tallest Purple, now resting his face in his hand and shaking his head back and forth slowly, almost painfully.

"Now I simply need to ascertain a way to return in time," mused Zim, rubbing his chin.

"Read a book or something, just don't take your sweet time, Zim," moaned Tallest Red, rubbing his temple to ward off an incoming migraine. Part of him hoped Zim would get back - or better yet, get blown up in the attempt - rather than stay here and pester them further in the year 3000. It had been a good nine centuries ...

"No time to waste, My Tallest. Invader Zim, signing off!" said Zim staunchly as he snapped to attention and saluted before ending his transmission.

Light years away, Tallest Red and Tallest Purple looked at each other and sighed.

"What did we do to deserve him - again?" said Tallest Red.

Tallest Purple just shook his head and stuffed some snacks into his beard-bedraggled mouth.

Back on Earth, Zim shook Gir fully awake and extended a spider leg once more from his PAK, this one equipped with a laser-cutting tip that he trained on the far wall.

The words "read a book or something" were rooted foremost in Zim's mind, and the seeds of a viable plan began to germinate in his brain.

"Get ready, Gir!" he sneered as the laser tip began to bore into the wall. "We're going - to the library!

TBC 


	10. Chapter 10

Just as Zim began burning an escape route in the wall of Planet Express, alarms began blaring wildly, coloring the closet he was inside in a fluorescent shade of crimson. Apparently there had been sensors lining the room after all, not of the motion-detection kind, but more of the property-damaging variety.

"Gir!" shouted Zim to his ever-present robot companion. "Time to rocket out of here!"

Gir snapped to attention and then went horizontal, igniting his jets to keep him aloft. The door opened, Leela and Fry bursting in just as Zim climbed aboard Gir and the two of them blasted through the hole that Zim had lasered in the wall.

"Onward to vengeance!" yelled Zim as he held on, Gir jetting through the bustling 30th century streets at breakneck speed.

"Damn it!" yelled the Professor, now awake, as he elbowed his way past Leela and Fry to see the damage done to his business. "More things I can't pay for! Well, let's get after them!"

The Farnsworth group spilled out into the streets and began following the smoke trail left behind by Gir, who continued to speed away from the Planet Express building towards the library Zim thought he had seen during one of his outdoor excursions last week in this stink place. Gir zipped towards the front stairs of the edifice at full speed and jetted just above the ground, intending to pull up and execute a perfect two-point landing; but being Gir, he throttled down a tad too late, and the Irken duo wound up bouncing up the stairs like an Old West cowboy on his bucking bronco.

"Ooof! Owww! Ouch!" complained Zim as he was jostled up and down, only coming to rest when Gir leveled out on the top stair and sped through the front door like a miniature train, jets still going strong.

"Gir! Stop! STOP!" commanded Zim, holding on for dear life.

"Okey-dokey!" squeaked Gir, instantly cutting his jets - and sending the unprepared Zim flying, the green meanie tumbling head over heels.

"Aaaahhhh!" cried Zim as he was hurled towards the far wall, finally impacting it back-first and upside-down, the Irken subsequently issuing a loud groan. His PAK bore most of the brunt, but Zim was still dazed as he slid downwards and landed none too gently on his green skull, the invader finally flopping over onto his stomach and lying there face down.

Gir was slightly scratched up and sparking a bit, but not too banged up. By now he had regained his cylindrical feet and was ambling giddily over to Zim, the droid smiling mindlessly.

"C'mon, master!" he said. "No time to sleep!"

He shook Zim gently with a metallic hand, trying to rouse him, but Zim was awake.

"I'm awake, Gir!" snapped Zim at his minion as he rolled over. He looked up and saw the slight hurt in Gir's face and then softened his voice as he rose.

"It's OK, Gir, we just need to work on your braking. Now, let's see which of these monkeys can help us around – the library!" hissed Zim.

"This isn't the library, it's the museum," came a hoarse voice from behind them. It was owned by a grossly overweight, dark brown human female wearing a blue uniform and sitting behind a much too small desk.

"Museum?" mused Zim, looking confused. "How will that help me?"

"Well, what are you looking for?" replied the enormous woman in the tiny blue hat, who probably could have swallowed Zim whole if she chose. He thus maintained his distance while staring intently at her.

"I need to find a way back to my own time!" he shouted, pointing right at her. "And I need books to show me the way!"

"Hell, you don't need no books," she croaked. "Just go all the way down the hall and take a left, and you can ask some of history's greatest minds for help!"

"Eh?" he mouthed, unsure of how minds could help him.

"Just go down the hall and ask Albert Einstein, he'll tell you," she croaked again, her throat expanding like a frog's after she had spoken.

"Very well, giant frog woman," said Zim, "I shall inquire of this Albert Einstein how I can return to my own time!"

And with that he turned on his heel and made his way down the corridor, with Gir following close behind. They passed a giant bronze sculpture of an ancient Spartan, a giant handmade bronze teakettle, and a giant bronze squid before making their way into the Hall of Minds.

The room was filled with shelves upon shelves, and on those shelves were jars upon jars, and in those jars were living, breathing human heads. Heads of all great past heads of state, science, and celebrity, with some of them here for more than a millennia. Zim looked around, a bit overwhelmed, and decided that the sooner he could get out of here the better.

"You there!" he commanded, pointing at the nearest jar. "Head! Tell me where I can find Albert Einstein!"

The head Zim had pointed to looked displeased and even disrespected.

"I have a name, you know," said Leonard Nimoy, his famous name etched in bronze on the wooden base of his jar.

"I have no time for guessing games!" admonished Zim. "I need to find Albert Einstein – now!" He shook his angry black-gloved fist at the Star Trek legend.

"My name is right ..." started Nimoy.

"No guessing games!" snapped Zim.

"But it's ..."

"No guessing games!"

"Fine," said Nimoy. "He's over in that corner. And I'm Leonard Nimoy!"

"That voice …" came another, muffled voice from one of the shelves. Zim heard it and looked around, but he couldn't ascertain just which head it came from. He began to walk towards the area that the head called Nimoy had indicated, when he heard a rumbling noise, as if something was being pushed along on one of the shelves. He spun around and looked, but could see nothing. He resumed his course.

More rumbling. More looking. Still nothing. Zim had almost made his way to the corner when there was one last rumbling noise, a voice saying "Whoa!" and then ultimately the sound of crashing glass.

Zim looked back to see former major league baseball slugger Johnny Damon - or rather, his head - looking like he/it did in his/its wild man days with the world champion Boston Red Sox. The head was lying atop its base surrounded by pools of fluid and numerous glass shards, none of which had inflicted any wounds.

"Hey, what was that about?" said Damon, directing his voice upwards to the shelf where the head had once rested, a bookcase collection marked above its top shelf with a capital letter 'D'. Zim blinked at the Damon head, then cast his gaze upwards to the spot where it had once rested. He could make out another jar, somehow moving under its own power, pushing its way up front from the second row. His jaw dropped and he wanted to clean his contacts, but then he realized he wasn't wearing them.

Zim saw a stupid, scowling white face decorated with stupid eyeglasses, and a stupid shock of scythe-like black hair emerging from the top of the jar. And the head they were all attached to was big - as big as Zim remembered, bigger perhaps than all the other heads in the room. He managed to pull his jaw back up and utter a single word, one he had never expected to say again.

"Dib?"

TBC 


	11. Chapter 11

"DIB!" roared Zim, not sure if he had heard himself right the first time.

"Yes, it's me, Zim!" snapped Dib, as unpleased to see Zim as the Irken had been to see him. He looked a bit older than Zim had remembered, with some gray hairs at the temples and some wrinkles on his cheeks, but there was no mistaking the Dib for anyone else that Zim had encountered in all his travels, especially not those Planet Express monkeys.

Seeing Dib's enormous head again, though, was the last straw for the Irken invader. First he had had to deal with those delivery service fools for a solid week, and then he had found out that the Almighty Tallest had completely forgotten about him and his mission on Earth, and now he had discovered that his greatest enemy of all had survived into the 30th century!

"How did YOU make it all this time, silly earth monkey?" roared Zim again, his clenched fists extended far above his head.

"My father was a brilliant inventor, Zim, and figuring out a way to cheat death was only one of his many accomplishments," replied Dib proudly, while still scowling down at his old enemy.

"After he was placed into cryogenic suspension because of a rare illness, I took over the family business and made 'Membrane' a household name. I made a host of pertinent discoveries in the fields of both scientific research and paranormal study and … hey, why I am telling you all this?"

"Silence!" cried Zim, just as enraged as he had been all those centuries ago when he had matched wits with Dib on a daily basis. Well, maybe not matched, as Zim felt Irken intelligence to be infinitely superior to human thinking; but parrying with Dib day in and day out had infuriated Zim back then, and now all that old fury had flared up again a millennium later.

"Don't you order me around, I'm a thousand years old!" retorted Dib. "I have to admit though, Zim, that after you up and disappeared in the 21st Century, I was at a loss for what to do. When I finally convinced myself that you were truly gone for good, I was able to concentrate on the really important things in life. I earned scientific degrees from Cal Tech and MIT and went on to actually make something of myself, instead of just wasting all my time trying to foil your ludicrous plans of conquest."

Dib smiled mockingly, his tone colored with disdain.

"So in a way, Zim, I guess I have you to thank for all this!"

Zim looked at Dib as if he had never seen him before.

"So you want to thank me for you being a head in a jar?" chided Zim.

"Hey, everybody does this nowadays!" shot back Dib incredulously. "Only the best of the best get their heads preserved, and I've been voted one of the greatest people to ever live!"

Zim crossed his arms across his chest and stared at Dib, his green lower lip twitching with anger, his one violet eye larger than the other. He thought back to those halcyon days of time on Earth when he had planned to win a skool election, and subsequently have Dib's head removed and filled with salted nuts … Then Dib started talking again and shook Zim back to the present/future.

"So thanks again, Zim," expressed Dib. "Without you having left, I might still be wasting my time trying to stop an Irken invasion that was never going to come!"

Dib practically spit out the last few words, bubbles rising in his jar but quickly dissipating at the surface.

Zim stood steadfast, as if accepting a challenge.

"Guess again, head boy!" shouted Zim, shaking his fist at Dib and sounding as if he were preparing to play a hidden trump card.

"I'm going to get back to that long-ago time and bring the Massive to Earth! The Irken armada will finally overrun your pathetic planet, and then you'll be lucky to be a huge head in a giant toilet tank! Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha!"

"How are you gonna get back, Zim?" queried Dib, one eyebrow set higher than the other.

Zim was taken a bit aback by the question. Truth be told, he had no idea how to accomplish the task, and had hoped that someone here in the future would have told him by now.

"I'll get back," he snapped, shaking his fist again. "I'll fly the Voot Cruiser right back to the point where I left, and then you will pay – oh, how you will pay!"

"Good luck with that, Zim," mocked Dib. "From what I remember, your little space ship has nowhere near the power needed to traverse the space-time barrier, so unless you build yourself a time machine, I guess you're stuck here in 3000 with the rest of us! Ha ha!"

"Well ..." started Zim, looking around and twiddling his thumbs, obviously flustered. "Perhaps ... someone with ... great intellect could ... build one?"

The words hurt as they came out, and sounded as if Zim were begging, which wasn't too far from the truth.

"Yeah, right!" chortled Dib, pleased with seeing his old enemy sinking so low. "Like I'd ever help you get back!"

"Yeah, well – your head is huge!" replied Zim, at a loss to say anything else. He was pleased to find that the words still stung Dib after all these centuries, though.

"My head is not big!" cried Dib, shaking in his jar and spilling some fluid over the top.

"Yeah, well, not from where I sit," said the standing Zim. "But then, only someone with a huge head could possibly wield the intellect to build a time machine."

"You're not gonna catch me with that trick, Zim!" shouted Dib. "You'd have a better chance of getting caught in an explosion to propel you back in time and … ahhhh!"

"That's it!" yelled the wily Zim. "All I have to do is generate an explosion, and I'll be sent back to Earth in the past!"

"Me, too?" queried Gir, looking up from where he had been sipping fluid from Yanni's jar.

"Yes, Gir, you too," said Zim matter-of-factly.

"Guess again, Zim!" bellowed Dib. "You'd need an explosion equivalent to the strike of a bolt of lightning to do that, and ... why do I keep doing this?"

"Well, it's true," said actor Christopher Lloyd from another shelf in the room, the thespian having performed such a feat cinematically in the "Back to the Future" trilogy.

"Lightning it shall be then!" howled Zim, pointing up menacingly at Dib, when there was a commotion around the bend and he heard several futuristic voices he recognized, voices belonging to the Fry, Leela and Professor humans, plus that giant frog woman Zim had just met.

"They're here!" hissed Zim, sensing his time was short. "Gir, hide! Quickly!"

"Okey-dokey!" squealed the droid as he began to careen about the hall, looking for a safe place to disappear. Dib, though, was only too happy to help out his old acquaintances.

"HERE!" he cried at the top of his head. "They're in here!"

"Oh, you horrible, interfering Dib!" shrieked Zim, as several pairs of footsteps came closer …

TBC 


	12. Chapter 12

Zim looked around nervously, scanning for a place to hide before the Planet Express morons saw him, but all he could see were heads upon heads in countless jars, and Gir running around like the proverbial headless chicken. Zim snarled as he saw Dib smiling derisively at him from above, and then a particularly wicked thought crossed the Irken's superior mind.

Spider-legs extended from his PAK and lifted Zim from the floor, and before Dib knew what was happening, his old adversary had scaled the shelves and was upon him, snatching up the jar that had been Dib's home for the last century or so.

"You're coming with us, head boy!" crowed Zim, his confidence re-energizing as he took charge of the situation. "Let's go, Gir!" yelled Zim over his shoulder, realizing the time for subterfuge was – well, there hadn't been any time for subterfuge.

"Let's make biscuits!" howled the tiny automaton as he ceased running, and then with a mighty leap he landed deftly on Zim's PAK just as Leela and company rounded the corner.

"Hold it, Zim!" shouted Leela as she looked up and stopped in her tracks. "You're coming with us!"

Hermes and the Professor stood to one side of her, and Fry, Bender, and Amy to the other. Scruffy the Janitor never really left the Planet Express headquarters if he could help it, and this was one of those times.

"I am Zim!" cried the diminutive green alien, toting Dib's head in one hand while balling up the other into a fist and shaking it at the assembled 30th century throng. "I go where I please, monocular cow!"

He sprang forward on his legs and landed just in front of his futuristic foes, Gir laughing wildly and holding on behind, Dib yelling and sloshing around in his jar.

"Help me!" pleaded Dib, who had suddenly discovered you really were at someone's mercy when all that remained of you was a head. Then he realized that Zim had never really shown any mercy …

"Put that head down!" yelled Fry, still angry at Zim for the way he had treated Leela the previous day aboard the Planet Express ship.

"Make me, filth!" challenged Zim, again shaking his fist.

Fry growled himself and looked around, and then he saw an antique bronze spear adorning the wall just outside of the hall as he was only standing partway in the entrance. He tried to wrench the spear off its moorings, but they held fast. He strained and grunted and pulled and even braced his feet against the wall while holding onto the spear with both hands, but no success. He remained suspended in that position, three feet above the floor, until Bender lithely reached over and pulled the spear free with just one small tug of his powerful servomotors, sending Fry crashing down.

"Ow!" yelped Fry, rubbing his hip after landing on it.

"Happy to help, buddy," replied Bender. "Hee hee hee hee!"

Fry regained his feet and took up the spear in an aggressive stance, and then he lunged at Zim, who deftly moved to the side.

"Hey, watch it!" spouted Zim. "You almost hit me!"

"That's the idea!" retorted Fry, who lunged and missed again, and again, as Gir held onto Zim's antennae and squealed with delight while Dib's head looked like it was about ready to vomit from motion sickness. Then Fry swung his spear like a baseball bat, hoping to slice Zim sideways, but the 21st century invader was quick to parry with one of his front spider legs.

It was reminiscent of the arena scene out of "Star Wars: Episode Two" where Obi-Wan Kenobi, armed only with a spear on the planet Geonosis, fought against the fearsome mantis-like Ackley. Only Fry was no Jedi Master, and Zim finally slammed the spear away from Fry with a backhanded thrust of his front right spider-leg, and then swept Fry aside with his front left leg and knocked him to the floor.

"Fry!" cried Leela, as she rushed to him and bent down alongside him. Zim laughed, a hollow, mocking, maniacal sound,

"I'm OK," replied Fry as she sat up, smiling at her. She smiled back as she rested a hand on his shoulder, and then they looked over to see Zim scrunching downwards with his entire assembly of extra limbs, almost to the floor, before catapulting himself up and over the rest of the Planet Express crew and back into the main museum corridor, where the trio of Zim, Gir and Dib bounded away towards the Hall of Dinosaurs and Other Really, Really Big Reptiles.

They hurtled past the giant female security guard and into the hall, with the Planet Express crew following at varying rates of speed, from Leela's all-out run to the Professor's shuffling along. Leela, Fry and Bender got to the hall first, where Zim looked over and snarled at them. He quickly darted away on metallic arachnid legs, running up the spine of a Tyrannosaurus skeleton that had been positioned in an archaic posture with its tail dragging on the ground and the creature standing upright in Godzilla-like fashion. Dib bounced up and down as they passed each bone, fluid splashing from his jar as he grew even more nauseous.

Zim danced along the spinal column as he raced away from his pursuers, still holding on to Dib and with Gir holding on to Zim. Their combined weight, though, began bending the thin steel rebar used to hold the dinosaur skeleton together beneath them, and as such the long-gone animal structure dropped forward into a more correct scientific posture, leaning forward with its tail off the ground. Zim leaped off just before reaching the massive, tooth-studded Tyrannosaur skull, and then looked back upon landing to view his handiwork.

"Hmmm," he remarked. "How about that?"

Then he saw Leela, Fry and Bender heading towards him and began to flee again.

"Huff," wheezed the out-of-shape Fry. "Huff … This was … easier … huff … when we had … huff … superpowers."

The trio had formed the New Justice Team when Leela and Fry temporarily developed extraordinary, meta-human abilities from a tube of analgesic ointment, but Fry's enhanced speed as Captain Yesterday and Leela's superhuman strength as Cloberella ultimately disappeared when the contents of the tube had been exhausted.

"Hey, wait!" said Bender. "I still have my superpowers!"

Being a robot, he had already been stronger and faster than ordinary humans, and had taken the heroic name Super King, only to retire from costumed crime-fighting when Leela and Fry did. He reached out and unspooled his mechanical arms faster than the human eye or Leela's could follow, Bender's manipulators finally latching onto Zim's PAK and stopping the Irken's headlong flight.

"Gahhh!" cried Zim at the sudden stop, Gir nearly pulling his master's antennae out as he was flung up and over Zim. Dib went flying, too, straight up into the air as he tried hard not to throw up. He went up and over, nearly spilling all the fluid from his jar, but landed right back in Zim's tiny black arms. Dib looked like he would vomit at any second, and Zim decided he didn't want to be there when that happened, especially since he knew he would undoubtedly see Dib again. Extending small fingers from the end of one spider-leg, Zim snatched Dib up with that limb and prepared his old foe for launch.

"See you in the 21st Century, earth monkey!" chortled Zim with his trademark laugh, and then he tossed Dib's head back like a blernsball towards Leela, Fry and Bender, who was still holding onto Zim's PAK. Dib was headed straight for Bender, and Planet Express' resident robot was forced to retract his arms to make the catch before Dib's head collided with his own.

"Ahhhh!" cried Dib as he came in for landing, but Bender caught him expertly and set him down on the floor, whereby Dib could hold himself back no longer and prepared to throw up – until nothing came up, and he realized he had no stomach or anything below the neck any longer, and just had a headache.

"You OK there, Heady?" inquired Bender, lighting up a cigar in front of yet another '"No Smoking" sign.

"Yeah," coughed Dib, thankful he had finally come to a stop. "I think so."

Then Dib sneezed as Bender tapped his cigar and dumped some ashes onto him. He looked up at Bender and glared at the automaton.

"What?" replied Bender. "There's still some water in that jar - no way you'll catch fire!"

Freed from Bender's grasp, Zim and Gir made good their escape as Zim retracted his spider-legs and Gir, now holding onto Zim's PAK again, ignited his foot jets and rocketed them out of an open second-story window, the twosome only touching down when they were well away from the museum.

"Good job, Gir," offered Zim as they made a solid landing. He looked around to see that no one from Planet Express was still in pursuit, and he decided that enough was enough.

It was time to get the Voot Runner ready. It was time to go home.

TBC 


	13. Chapter 13

Zim looked around a tad nervously, contemplating his next move, when suddenly he heard sirens blaring and steel-skinned hover-drones issuing police broadcasts. Zim grabbed Gir, who was smiling absent-mindedly per usual, and dragged them both around a corner as a pair of the insect-like automatons flitted by.

"Alert!" they cried. "Alert! Citizens of New New York are requested to be on the lookout for a small green alien and accompanying droid wanted in connection with recent incidents of vandalism and head-napping at the NNY Museum of Natural & Current History. Suspects are approximately four feet tall and considered armed and dangerous. Citizens should make every possible attempt to apprehend perpetrators so police do not have to bother. Thank you, that is all."

Zim began to sweat, and he peered out of the alley with great caution, hoping no other police personnel were present. All week long he and Gir had been able to walk around with impunity in their natural forms, but now it was time to return to a routine he had grown to know well, that of impersonating a filthy Earther. His PAK shook with some internal activity and suddenly both Zim and Gir were bathed in translucent green light as holograms shadowed their forms. Seconds later the light coalesced into a semblance of actual physical clothing, with Zim appearing as a bearded old man with hat and coat and Gir outfitted in his familiar green dog suit. The clothes were merely beams of solidified light, but they would suffice for a while, especially with their actual disguises still located back at Planet Express inside the Voot Runner.

"That's better - I think," said Zim. "Come, Gir!"

He grabbed hold of Gir's holographic leash and dragged him along, Gir humming happily to himself. Planet Express headquarters was less than a half-mile away, if Zim remembered correctly, and although it would be faster for them to just have Gir attain rocket mode, it was just too risky with the omnipresent police bulletins. Zim knew had to get back to his temporary home of the last week and get the Voot Runner ready for the return trip to 21st Century Earth. He had had enough of the 30th Century and its people, and now it was time to get back to a place where the people were less technologically advanced, far stupider intellectually, and absolutely ripe for Irken conquest. Yes, Zim grinned, shaking his free fist. Back to the past, where I ...

They rounded a corner just a few blocks from their destination and ran smack dab into the human cop and his robotic partner who always seemed to be on duty in New New York.

"Hey," snapped the human officer. "Watch where you're going, shorty!"

The comment angered Zim, but he didn't want to blow his cover if he could help it.

"Sorry, officer," he replied in a low, exaggerated voice. "My dog and I did not see you standing there."

"You got a license for that dog?" asked the robot cop in his Barry White-like tone, pointing at the disguised droid, who sat there motionless and staring.

Zim didn't have an answer at the ready for that inquiry.

"Uhhhh..." was all he managed to get out.

"What, you mean he doesn't have a license?" asked the human cop, unfastening an illuminated nightstick from his belt and steadily pounding it into the palm of his left hand.

"Well ..." stammered Zim, starting to sweat again.

"I think maybe we need to take you two down to the station house," offered the robotic office. "Check you and your dog for everything else, while we're at it."

"Okey-dokey!" squeaked Gir, but Zim knew the time for pretense had passed.

"Gir!" shouted Zim. "Time to reveal your mighty robot form!"

He stabbed a finger at a band on his wrist and the holographic clothing shrouding both Zim and Gir dissolved to reveal their true forms.

"Hey, it's ..." started the human cop, before he was rendered unconscious by a blast of freon from Zim's PAK that flash-froze him in place.

"What the ..." began the robot cop before Zim's PAK hit him with an electromagnetic pulse that scrambled the robot's systems before shutting them down altogether. Gir was also caught up in the blast, but since his systems were almost always scrambled, the EMP actually locked him into duty mode, coloring him red and silver.

"Reporting for duty, sir!" he saluted his master.

"Take me to the Planet Express!" postured Zim, one hand on his hip and the other pointing to the sky as he turned to look at Gir. "But no rockets!"

"Affirmative!" responded Gir, and he picked Zim up over his head and carried him swiftly through the streets.

The Planet Express crew had by now exited the museum and begun the trek back to their base, with some of them wondering if they should just cab it back. Leela shook her head.

"Zim and Gir are so small they could be anywhere," said Leela. "If we take a cab, we could pass them right by and never know it."

"But they're way ahead of us! " cried Fry.

"I know, Fry," countered Leela, "but even if we got into a taxi right this minute, Gir's exhaust trail is already dissipating. We'll split up and look around, and then we'll meet in one mile back at headquarters. They can't haven't gotten too far on those little jets."

"You hope not," said Bender, starting his own smoke trail with his cigar. Leela scowled at him, but then she quickly split them up into three teams in the Professor and Hermes, Amy and Dr. Zoidberg, and the former New Justice Team. They raced off in separate directions, with Leela and company far outpacing everyone else.

"Finally, I'm part of a team!" said Zoidberg gleefully as he and Amy went off down a different street.

Professor Farnsworth held Hermes back with one arm until the others were out of sight.

"Screw this, let's get a cab!" said The Professor indignantly.

"Right with you, mon," smiled Hermes as he raised his right arm to flag down a checkered hovercraft. "Taxi!"

Gir kicked open the main door of the Planet Express headquarters and brought Zim inside, the automaton still in duty mode and still carrying his master over his head. He then dropped Zim unceremoniously by the Voot Runner, still nestled in the shadow of the Planet Express Ship.

"Oof!" cried Zim as hit the floor with more than a little bit of force. "Careful, Gir!"

"Apologies, sir!" said Gir, snapping to attention and saluting.

"Never mind," replied Zim, waving his hand as he approached the landing bay controls situated on the nearest wall and pulled a lever, pointing at Gir while he did so. "Scan local weather patterns for possible lightning strikes!"

Gir looked up towards the heavens as the bay roof peeled back and revealed the sun, still burning strongly in the 30th century. Information raced through his mechanical brain, much sharper and more reliable when he was locked into his current form of operation.

"I am detecting no impending precipitation or electrostatic charge buildup," replied the red-eyed Gir in a cold mechanical tone. "Building roof is also rimmed with lightning rods, to dissipate any possible atmospheric electrical strikes!"

Zim's squeedily spootch sank.

"No lightning?" he said, more to himself than to Gir. He looked almost mournfully at the Voot Runner, which he had remotely keyed into a self-diagnostic and repair mode, but without sufficient energy to crack open the space/time barrier, fixing the ship meant nothing.

"How will I possibly generate approximately 1.21 gigawatts of power with no lightning?" growled Zim, his melancholy fading and his anger now rising as he shook a fist at the sun. Perhaps he could harness solar energy - but no, that would take far too long, he thought, and he had to do something before those Planet Express fools got back.

The answer came from behind him.

"Sir!" shouted Gir in militaristic fashion. "Sensors indicate that main engine of Planet Express Ship can generate at least 1.21 gigawatts of power when vessel is traversing the vacuum of space at full speed!"

Zim felt his hopes rising again as he looked back at his small friend. Gir was saluting his commander, no hint of emotion on his face, until suddenly he began sparking and shaking all over. Zim was taken aback, fearing Gir was about to explode and leave him all alone, but in actuality the EMP had almost entirely dissipated and Gir's programming was returning to its normal, brain-damaged mode. He changed from red to cyan yet again and then collapsed face first onto the floor, still saluting.

"Hi floor, make me a sammich!" he squeaked, just like he had all those months ago at the library when Zim had managed to bring him out of duty mode at the last possible second before he would have terminated his master. Apparently all that had been forgotten, and just as well, Zim mused.

Zim looked up at the exhaust of the Planet Express ship, as smiled wickedly as his mighty Irken brain began formulating a fantastic plan to get them both back home. And he began to laugh, as only Invader Zim could laugh ...

TBC 


	14. Chapter 14

Zim began re-wiring the defense systems of the Planet Express headquarters, his PAK having had ample time to adapt to all the futuristic technology of the past week. The Voot Runner was still repairing itself, something Zim had wished to perform during the last seven days but hadn't wanted to risk, even if the Professor had originally said his goal was to get Zim and Gir back home. The mere thought of that smelly, angry old human caused Zim to flinch momentarily, but he soon got back to the task at hand. A few more modifications and he would be able to erect a force field around the entire building that would keep his futuristic foes out of his business until he could attain launch for the journey back to the 21st century - with Gir, of course.

Gir, meanwhile, was happily humming to himself in a corner, watching the popular 30th century robotic soap opera "All my Circuits" on a small monitor when he began hearing a mechanized voice calling to him.

"Gir ..." it came, seemingly from nowhere and yet everywhere.

"You talkin' to me?" queried Gir to the characters on the screen, particularly lead automaton Calculon; but no one on the tube acknowledged that they had heard the little bot, so he simply went back to humming and watching.

"Gir ..." came the voice again, beckoning to him. Gir looked around warily, then shrugged his shoulders and got up and walked towards the voice. He ambled inside a small four-walled structure complete with one-way plasti-glass windows the Professor had erected as a shield against radiation experiments, and when Gir got inside he noticed it was dark, and red, and hot, at least according to his limited sensors; and sitting there in all his mechanized satanic glory was the Robot Devil himself.

"Hello, Gir!" smiled the Devil. Gir looked dumbfounded, which wasn't too far removed from his normal state.

"Who you?" asked Gir, leaning forward so far that he almost fell over, before he started moving his arms in a continuous windmill-like motion to keep him upright.

"I'm the Robot Devil," responded the red-metal bot, drawing back slightly at the breeze Gir was generating.

"You've been a bad little robot, Gir," grinned the devil maliciously. "Always breaking things, eating food, screaming out loud and causing commotions - and now I've come to take you to Robot Hell!"

Gir thought hard for a few seconds, running scenarios through the monies, paper clips, screws, marbles and other assorted junk the Almighty Tallest had put inside his skull to pass for a brain. Mental gymnastics done, he looked up at the Robot Devil and smiled broadly.

"Okey-dokey!" he said, continuing his windmill impersonation.

The Devil was taken aback. No droid had ever wanted to go to Robot Hell so willingly.

"You're sure?" asked the Devil, flabbergasted. "You have no problems with eternal mechanical damnation?"

"Nope, nope, nope!" grinned Gir, shaking his head from side to side so quickly it looked as if it would spin right off his body.

"Well, I have to admit I wasn't expecting it to be this easy," mused the Devil, who had continually tried to trick artificial souls into his netherworld domain through the ages to swell his demonic cyber-ranks. Gir wasn't even that bad - more childishly destructive and oblivious than anything, really, but a soul was a soul.

The Devil stood up to his full height and braced himself on his pitchfork.

"No need to make this any harder than I have to, then," he stated. "Any last requests, Gir?"

Gir suddenly stood up straight and began the dangerous business of thinking once again, one hand resting under his chin.

"You got any of them taquitos?" he finally asked.

The Robot Devil was mystified.

"No, I do not have any ta-quitos," he replied, wondering just what in the hell a taquito was.

Gir was no quitter, though. He kept trying.

"How 'bout a clown with no head?" he queried.

The Devil was even more baffled. Where did this little robot come up with these things? Was he playing the devil for a fool? Was he just kidding? Was he really brain-damaged?

Not even Hedonism Bot had been so utterly out of touch with reality. The Devil began to back away from the Irken automaton - Robot Heaven surely wasn't going to want Gir, and now Robot Hell feared he would take it over and rule it with an excessively insane fist.

"Uh, no, I don't think so," the Devil finally got out, while scanning for a possible way out.

Gir, though, was adamant.

"Headless clown!" he cried, again wind-milling his arms, and then he screamed even louder. "HEADLESS CLOWN!"

Now the Devil was really scared, and he knew it was time to beat a hasty retreat before he got caught up in Gir's artificial madness.

"Sorry, Gir, got to be going," he said quickly, and then the Robot Devil touched his trident to the floor and disappeared in a cloud of billowy orange smoke.

Gir dispersed the brimstone-smelling puff away with his swiftly-rotating arms, not that he could smell it, anyway, and then he stood up straight again and looked around to find he was all alone.

"Oh well," he shrugged, as he turned and began to goose-step out of the room only to be halted by another visitor, this one known to him.

"GIR!" shouted Zim as he entered the small structure. "What's going on back here? Who were you talking to?"

Gir thought for a second, then gave up.

"I don't know," he replied matter-of-factly as he slouched in front of his master.

"Well, stop fooling around!" admonished Zim, raising one finger into the air. "This is serious work we do!"

He grabbed Gir by the arm and dragged him back out into the main bay. The sound of metal scraping on concrete irritated Zim until he finally got to a control panel and dumped Gir to the floor, where Gir simply lay on his back and stared up at the ceiling. Zim began pushing buttons and pulling levers until finally a loud mechanical hum issued from the console, bringing an evil smile to his green face.

Overhead, through the now-retracted roof, violet-colored energy could be seen surging and shimmering in the sky as Zim's makeshift force field enveloped the entire structure, keeping everyone out. Keeping him and Gir in, too, but not for too long ...

_OK, that was just a short interlude. Back to the main story next time …- S._


	15. Chapter 15

The Planet Express crew all arrived at their headquarters at about the same time, with Amy, Fry, Leela, Bender and Dr. Zoidberg all having hoofed it, and the Professor and Hermes pulling up in a taxi that had been delayed by midday traffic. They all looked up to see the building sheened in a translucent purple light, and the Professor immediately knew what had transpired.

"Damn it!" he cried, shaking his wrinkled fists. "That little green bastard Zim has put a forcefield up around the entire building!"

"Great! How are we supposed to get in now?" moaned Fry, rubbing his neck and still smarting from his museum duel with the Irken pest.

"Search me," replied the Professor - not that anybody wanted to - as he shrugged his shoulders.

"Well, guess we'll just have to wait this one out," said Bender, and he ignited another cigar with the lighter mounted in one of his fingers.

"No way!" snapped Leela as she spun to face Bender. "Who knows what that little creep and his robot are up to in there? For all we know they could be building a doomsday device!"

Everyone gasped and drew back from the building, while within, Zim laughed out loud as he admired his handiwork.

"I don't know how I do it, Gir!" he chortled. "Sometimes I even amaze myself!"

By now he was wiring a final series of connections into the Voot Runner, which had nearly finished its self-diagnostic and repair cycle and looked much the same as it always did - except for the giant engine and exhaust mounted below it, borrowed from the Planet Express ship. That vessel sat in its usual place on the launch pad ahead, looking none the worse for wear except for the damage still visible along its nose from Zim's hell-bent flight the other day, plus its newly-missing propulsion system.

Gir was busy standing on his head, humming to himself, and thus took no notice of Zim's self-aggrandizing, until his master reached out and grabbed Gir by one of his small, seemingly-unconnected legs and dangled him slightly off the ground.

"There it is, Gir!" beamed Zim proudly. "Our ticket home! Say good-bye to the filthy 30th Century!"

"Bye, century!" chimed Gir, waving his hand at no one. Zim then dumped Gir to the floor, leaving the little bot lying there in a small heap before Gir regained his feet and began to march after Zim. The Irken invader walked over to the Voot Runner and opened the canopy, then reached inside to flick a series of switches and begin warming up the engines, old and new alike.

"Soon we will leave this place far behind and return to our mission!" vowed Zim, wondering how much he had been set back by losing a week's time - assuming that he and Gir could even get back to the exact point from which they had departed the 21st Century.

No matter, thought Zim. A few days early, a few days late, blah blah blah, big deal! The key was getting back to Earth and preparing that horrible blue globe for the eventual coming of the Irken Armada. The Tallest would undoubtedly be pleased when he accomplished that, regardless of what their future selves had said. Forgotten about Zim, indeed! They would not forget him when his mission was completed, oh no, they would not.  
Outside, the Planet Express staff still searched for a way to get back inside their building, but the force field surrounding the structure seemed to extend everywhere.

"Professor, don't you have some kind of remote override?" queried Leela.

"Do I have a what?" replied the Professor, hard of hearing again.

"Isn't there any way to shut down the force field from the outside?" Leela asked again, a tad more exasperated this time.

"I'm afraid not, Leela," responded the Professor more coherently. "All the controls are located inside my lab."

"Can't we just blast through?" offered Fry hopefully.

"I'm afraid not, Fry," said his wrinkled nephew. "This baby was built tough, and the only way you might possibly penetrate it would be to short it out."

"With what?" asked Amy, trying to sound important in her intern's role, even though her rich-as-anything parents could easily buy the company a hundred times over.

"Well, something along the lines of Dolomite would probably work," responded the Professor. "It has mineral properties that could possibly shut down the field if applied in sufficient quantity. The question now is where can we possibly get some?"

Bender looked up nervously at the mention of Dolomite, knowing full well it comprised almost 40 percent of his structure. He hoped no one else remembered that as he slowly began to shuffle away, trying not to draw attention to himself.

"Hey, I think Bender's got some Dolomite in him!" shouted Fry, pointing to his robotic friend, who was trying to make good his escape.

"Shut up, Fry!" growled Bender under his alcohol-laced breath as he continued shuffling away, a tad faster now.

"By gosh, you're right, Fry!" exclaimed the Professor. "Come over here, Bender!"

"No way!" shouted Bender as his co-workers began to close ranks on him. "I'm not getting my systems scrambled for you guys!"

Bender opened his chest housing and produced an empty beer bottle, which he quickly shattered against his side. He then held it menacingly in front of him, trying to ward the others off as he moved away from the building and continued to back up. He was so engrossed in watching who was in front of him that he didn't see Leela down on her elbows and knees behind him, and without warning he toppled right over her and fell to the ground on his back. It was a trick the crew had used before, knowing that Bender was almost helpless in that position, like a turtle lying on its shell.

"Aw, not again!" moaned Bender as the rest of his so-called friends surrounded him.

"Everybody grab an arm or a leg!" shouted Leela to the rest of the staff. They all reached down and took hold of Bender's limbs, and then with a supreme unified effort managed to lift him off the ground.

"All right, people, start swinging him back and forth, and on three, toss him at the force field!" commanded Leela.

The group then started swaying, slowly at first under Bender's great weight, then faster and faster as they picked up momentum.

"No, no, no!" protested Bender, who was beginning to get a little bit dizzy from the constant back-and-forth motion.

"One ... two ... three!" ordered Leela, and then all together the Planet Express crowd hurled Bender headlong at their fortified headquarters.

"Ahhh ..." Bender began to yell, only to have his flight end just a second later when he hit the forcefield and got stuck to it, sparks of energy distortion flying everywhere.

"Ow! Ow! Ow!" he moaned. "Turn it off! Turn it offff!"

The forcefield began to shimmer and buckle, almost as if stiffening, like a living thing. It surged twice with a bright white light, causing Bender to spark even more furiously, until finally the entire field shut down from top to bottom, like a sheet being pulled from a bed, and ultimately and mercifully deposited a battered Bender on the sidewalk.

"Oh man, what a hangover!" he managed to blurt out as he lay there steaming and staring up at the sky. The rest of the crew didn't stop to tend to their fallen friend - he was too much of a jerk too much of the time - but instead rushed into their headquarters in hopes of stopping Zim. They arrived in the landing bay to see their ship's engine mounted underneath the much smaller Voot Runner, and Zim and Gir already inside the cockpit of the smaller ship and preparing to lower its canopy.

Zim, who was attired in his purple Irken battle armor, heard and saw his futuristic antagonists as they entered, and sneered at them.

"Fools!" he shouted. "You are too late to stop Zim!"

He pressed a button on the console in front of him and slowly the Voot Runner began to rise, before he pressed a second, smaller button.

"See you in the past, earth monkeys!" cried Zim. "Well, perhaps one of you, anyway!" he added, just as the canopy sealed shut over him and Gir, who waved happily at the crew.

Everyone in the bay turned to look at Fry.

"Hey!" he complained with a stern look on his face. "How come everybody always looks at me when someone says something like that?"

At first it looked as though the new engine was simply too massive for the tiny purple craft to support it, even with a large array of tubes and wires attached to it; but the small ship still began to rise, higher and higher, swaying to and fro as the Irken vessel tried to compensate for the extra mass. It rose steadily, angling itself slightly backwards as it did so, just as its new engine exhaust began to glow in a fluorescent blue fashion.

Leela's eye widened.

"Everybody down!" shouted Leela, as she grabbed Fry and Amy and pulled them to the floor behind a counter. Hermes did likewise with the Professor and Dr. Zoidberg just as Zim kicked in the afterburner. Indigo flame washed down onto the floor and was largely dissipated by specially-installed dampeners, although some of the blaze licked at the counters sheltering the Planet Express group. The Voot Runner immediately rocketed up and away like an ancient Earth space shuttle, Zim and Gir screaming within their Irken ship as they shot up through the open roof and towards the stars.

"We've got to get after them!" shouted Leela, leaping out from behind the slightly-charred counter.

"How?" whined Fry. "They took our engine!"

"Not to worry," offered the Professor. "I just happen to have a spare on hand!"

He shuffled over to the edge of the launch pad and pulled a large floor-mounted lever. A pair of bay doors opened in the floor just behind the Planet Express ship, and suddenly a new engine was ratcheted forward and inserted in cartoon-like fashion right into the vessel's exhaust.

"Good as new!" beamed the Professor, who was then swept up by his employees and dragged onto the bridge and strapped down along with everyone else. Leela began to rush through her pre-flight checklist, and then tossed it away.

"Oh, the hell with it!" she blurted out before she yanked back the stick, ignited the new engine, and took off in pursuit of Zim and Gir, who already had a substantial head start.

But out in space, someone was standing in the way, perhaps 30th Century Earth's last, best hope of stopping Invader Zim ...

TBCL 


	16. Chapter 16

_Sorry for the lengthy delay, I got wrapped up with too many other things in my life while trying to come up with a halfway decent ending. I hope I succeeded … - S._

The Voot Runner continued to build up speed as it rocketed through what was left of 30th Century Earth's atmosphere, and headed out into space. Soon it would achieve the velocity required to crack the space/time continuum and send Zim and Gir back to the 21st Century.

At least, that was the plan.

"More speed, Gir!" yelled Zim as he held onto the controls, even though Gir was sitting right next to him. "We have to be going fast enough so that we can make sure we go back in time!"

Gir blinked, then smiled.

"When we get home, can I watch 'The Angry Monkey Show' again?" he inquired of his master. Gir hadn't seen it for a week since they had come to the future, and no one seemed to have had any copies of it in the year 3000.

Zim's lower lip curled up as he squinted one of his eyes.

"That … horrible monkey!" he spat, and then he softened his tone just a tad.

"Yes, Gir, you can watch it, assuming the base is still there!"

There was no reason it shouldn't be in the same spot they had left it, although with the way things had gone the last week, Zim wasn't sure of anything anymore. He was just hoping to get back to almost the exact point from whence they had departed the 21st Century.

Gir smiled.

"I love that show!" he chimed as he pressed series of buttons that increased power to the ship's engines.

Suddenly a red warning light flashed on the Voot Runner's control board, accompanied by the blare of emergency sirens.

"Alert!" shouted the computer's voice. "Alert! Sensors indicate vehicle in pursuit!"

"Eh?" stammered Zim, incredulously. Who could be following them? And then he realized it had to be those Planet Express fools, a suspicion he confirmed by seeing their ship on one of his video screens.

Zim growled. Would he never be rid of them? Still, he had a head start on those filthy future people, and with the Voot Runner possessing the same type of engine that was producing the exact same output of thrust, he realized theoretically there was no way they could catch him. He grinned toothily, and decided to rub that fact in.

The intercom of the Planet Express Ship crackled briefly, followed by Zim's cackling voice.

"Goodbye, Leela," he chortled as he appeared on their viewscreen and saw her at the ship's controls. "I'd like to say it's been fun, but it hasn't! Even in the 30th Century, you Earth fools have proven no match for the awesome might of Zim! Ha ha ha ha ha ha!"

"Now look here, you ..." started Leela, but Zim cut her off.

"Silence, Cyclops female!" he roared in defiance. "I'm headed back to the 21st Century where you can't reach me - and maybe I'll just use your own engine technology to alter history in favor of the Irken Empire! Ha ha! I am Ziimmm!"

He cut off his transmission and focused again on his headlong flight, still far ahead of his pursuers, who chased after him in vain. The only way to stop Zim now would be to head him off ...

... and then he wondered where the massive starship looming in front of him had come from.

"Aaaahhhh!" cried Zim.

Despite the fact it was still some ways off, Zim could see that the vessel was enormous, many times the size of the Planet Express ship, which itself dwarfed the tiny Voot. He pressed a button in front of him to examine the craft more closely, and utilizing his telescopic sensors, made out the name of the ship on its port bow.

It said, in all capital black letters, "NIMBUS".

Zim wasn't sure what a Nimbus was, but he didn't have time to ponder, as his communications speaker suddenly chattered with an incoming transmission.

"Attention approaching vessel!" came an authoritative if slightly pompous voice. "This is Captain Zapp Brannigan of the Starship Nimbus, and I order you to identify yourself and state your intentions!"

A four-color holographic image fluttered in front of Zim's console, revealing a blonde-headed human with big teeth, white gloves, and a crimson uniform trimmed with tan. Zim just blinked, mystified, and then thought to himself that this was undoubtedly one of the absolute dumbest-looking humans he had ever seen in his short history of dealing with the dim-witted race that called Earth home.

"I am Zim, an invader of the Irken Elite," he snarled, "and I go where I please, Goldilocks!"

"Me, too!" added Gir, popping out from behind Zim and waving at the images in front of them. Kif Kroker, Zapp's first officer, stepped out from behind his captain and waved back, only to catch an elbow in the gut from his commander.

"Oof!" gasped Kif, ovoid eyes widening.

"Kif, don't wave at these people!" admonished Brannigan. "Now look here, Greenie ..."

"The name is Zim!" shouted Zim, exasperated.

"Well, you called me Goldilocks, so I'm calling you Greenie! I'm a decorated starship captain ..."

"And I'm a highly decorated Invader!" shot back Zim, even though he had never really received any sort of Invader award from the Tallest. "Blah, blah - whatever, human! Just get out of my way!"

"No dice!" stated Zapp, crossing his arms in front of him. "No one gets past Zapp Brannigan!"

"Fine, human!" snapped Zim. "I will simply fly right by that plodding elephant you call a ship! Ha!"

Zap growled at Zim, his face turning a slight shade of red.

"Well, this elephant is going to squash that mosquito you call a vessel!" retorted Zapp, momentarily assuaging the sting to his pride.

"All hands to battle stations!" he yelled. "We're about to teach these two pipsqueaks a little lesson I like to call - Brannigan's Law!"

Along the Nimbus' hull, giant energy cannons began locking into place, all trained on the incoming vessel and its ridiculously large extra engine. Zim saw all this activity unfolding and began to sweat, not quite knowing what to do next. Slowing down wasn't an option - he couldn't risk breaking speed, or he and Gir might lose their chance to get back to the 21st century forever...

Zim floored his accelerator, pushing his control stick as far forward as it would go while diverting power from all other ship systems to propulsion, increasing the Voot Runner's speed as he added the thrust of his own engines to the one provided by Planet Express. Gir actually began to frost over slightly, and Zim exhaled in a cloud-like plume as the life support and climate control units began to power down, much as Zim himself had stolen power from his platoon's battle armors when he had trained on planet Hobo 13.

Leela scowled as she watched Zim pull away primarily with what had once been her ship's engine.

"He's getting away!" shouted Fry, pointing towards the ship's main window at the dwindling Voot Runner, as if no one else could see it.

"Like hell he is!" snapped Leela. "Arming weapons!"

She reached down and deftly flicked a series of switches to her right, and several diodes began to illuminate up and down her control panel.

"What weapons?" stammered Professor Farnsworth from the rear of the bridge. "The only weapon I ever installed on this crate was a newspaper gun!"

It was true. The Professor and Hermes had used that same gun to help their sons deliver papers when the younger duo had fallen behind on their delivery schedule with their now-defunct media enterprise, Awesome Express. There was a gun turret mounted on top of the hull, but that was just there for show.

Leela blinked, remembering, and then frowned once more.

"Damn it!" she finally got out. "Well, somebody load me some tabloids or something!"

She pressed her own throttle as far forward as it would go, pushing the engine past safety limits, and the increased forward motion threw everyone else back in their seats as Planet Express made one last attempt at stopping Invader Zim. The Voot Runner itself continued its headlong flight, blue flame thundering behind it from its borrowed engine, thrust augmented by the Voot's tiny blue jets. Just as it attained lightspeed velocity, bringing the trans-time rift into view, the Voot was almost on top of the Nimbus, which was still powering up its arsenal, but too late.

"Holy crap, they're gonna hit us!" yelled Brannigan, as he threw his arms up in front of his face and cowered behind Kif. The D.O.O.P. (Democratic Order of Planets), whom Zapp served and had nearly destroyed once, would not be pleased if someone put a hole in his ship that they would have to pay to have closed.

"Fire!" shouted Leela from the also-approaching Planet Express ship, just as her gun turret was finally locked and loaded with multiple back issues of the Awesome Express Times. She lined up Zim's ship in her targeting scope and depressed her firing trigger.

Zim chuckled frostily as he surged right for the Nimbus bridge, collision imminent, then used his superior self-professed piloting skills to pull back on the controls at the last possible milli-second and send his ship vaulting perfectly up and over the much larger vessel.

Almost.

The very tip of the Voot's stolen engine just barely nicked the uppermost portion of the Nimbus, but that microscopic collision was more than enough at the speed they were traveling to send Zim and Gir tumbling head over heels - and screaming wildly.

"Ahhhhh!" they cried in unison, unable to halt their rollercoaster ride right into the swirling rift, which automatically snapped shut right behind the Voot just after it had entered it.

The Nimbus was relatively undamaged, but then took several direct hits from a score of rolled-up newspapers that had been aimed at the now-disappeared Voot.

"Hey, watch where you're shooting!" snapped Brannigan. "Kif just cleaned those windows!"

Zapp leaned forward and noticed a small smudge of newsprint in the corner of the main observation window. He frowned.

"Kif, you're gonna have to suit up and clean the outside of the ship all over again!"

Kif was about to protest meekly, when they both saw the Planet Express ship coming right at them.

"Didn't we just go through this?" moaned Zapp, before retreating behind his crossed arms again.

"Pull up! Pull up!" cried Fry on the other craft as the Nimbus loomed into gigantic view.

"We're doomed!" cried Bender, shaking up and down and dropping the last vestiges of his cigar as he unbuckled himself. "Doooomed!"

Hermes and Amy and Zoidberg and everyone else were also shrieking in panic as a collision appeared unavoidable

Leela groaned as she pulled back on the controls as hard as she could, muscles knotting and tensing in her arms, sweat dripping down her brow as it appeared her ship was about to fatally slam into the other. One last pull, though, with both an unbuckled Fry and Bender now helping, and the Planet Express ship pulled clear of the Nimbus with just a few feet to spare - but the damage had already been done.

"Curse you, Zim!" cried the Professor as long-range scans showed no trace of the Voot Runner. "Curse yoooouuuu"  
Hopefully history would show that Zim hadn't succeeded; but then, the crew had seen before in their travels that the future and the past were both infinitely malleable, so no one was going to lose any sleep if Zim got their stolen engine back home in one piece …

Leela braked her ship into a much slower, more level trajectory aft of the Nimbus just as the communications channel chittered.

"Well, well, if it isn't sexy Captain Leela," said Zapp Brannigan smarmily, his toothy smile filling the viewscreen.

Leela dropped her head into her hand, just as Bender began laughing ...

The Voot Runner tumbled through a subspace conduit, on its way back to the 21st Century, and Zim fervently hoped that the slipstream they were traveling didn't end at a room with a moose. Zim and Gir held on to each other, screaming, just as they did at the beginning of their journey the previous week, when suddenly their ship lunged violently to the right to follow the contours of the slipstream tunnel. The Voot maintained its structural integrity, but its borrowed engine was shorn clear of its moorings by the sudden shift in velocity, ultimately shattering against the walls of the conduit.

"Ohhhh nooooo!" cried Zim.

The shock forced the time tunnel to collapse, forcibly ejecting the Irken vessel and its passengers, who then appeared above the planet Earth.

Zim couldn't immediately discern what time period they had emerged into, but he had more pressing problems on his Irken hands as warning lights and klaxons began flashing and ringing all throughout the Voot's cockpit, joined by Gir's own cries, as the ship began to plummet towards the blue globe below.

"The madness!" screamed Zim as he felt his brain warping from all the unyielding noise. "The madness!"

The ship continued its downward spiral like a wounded duck, twisting and turning and sparking from where its connections to the Planet Express engine had been severed.

Two astronauts from an American space shuttle docked at the International Space Station thought they saw something rocketing towards the planet, but then they shrugged their shoulders and went back to work. Not far off, a blue-suited being trailing a red cape was hefting a massive stone platform tinged in luminescent green light into space. He caught a glimpse of the alien vessel plummeting down, but was too involved with his own predicament to check it out.

The Voot Runner scorched as it plunged through the atmosphere on re-entry, its occupants still screaming out loud as their ship trailed smoke and flame across the sky. The twosome started frantically pushing buttons and pulling levers, trying to bleed off as much speed as possible before the inevitable impact. Zim slammed his fist down upon a giant smiley-face button on his control console, automatically firing the reaction control thrusters mounted in the craft's nose. For a few seconds the Voot began to slow, smoke dissipating from behind it as its velocity was retarded; but then the thrusters flared and died, and the ship began to fall again.

It kept falling as Zim and Gir howled out loud, as down they went, until finally the ship slammed into the ground upright and skidded forward, plowing a deep furrow behind it as it tore up the soil and cement below and sent debris flying in all directions. The street shook as the Voot continued on its path, now slowing with each passing meter, until finally it came to rest on the front lawn of a tiny green-and-purple structure with a network of power siphons extending from its outer walls into those of the adjoining homes. A small triangular flag reading "Earth" rested above the Voot as its partially melted canopy struggled to open, then popped free.

Dib, who had seen the whole thing from his roof, rushed up to Zim's house, a clear plastic sports bottle of water in his hand. His sister, Gaz, had refused to accompany him, calling him a moron, while his father had told Dib to run along and have fun.

Dib walked over to what was left of the picket fence by the house and peered into the mangled Voot, where he saw a dented Gir lying upside down, and a bruised Zim resting uncomfortably in his control chair. Dib blinked as he looked down at the Irken pair, then blinked again as he looked back at all the destruction Zim and Gir had wrought to the street and the surrounding property with their crash-landing.

He turned his large head to look back at Zim and scowled.

"Good going, Zim," he chided. "Really good!"

Zim stirred wearily from where he lay, feeling all the aches and pains of his latest imperfect landing. He cringed as he heard Dib's voice, then opened his purplish orbs slightly to glimpse Dib standing there along with his base, neither looking any different from when he had left.

"Geez, Zim, this is just like yesterday where you tunneled a hole in the hallway with that handheld drill device you brought to skool!" continued Dib.

Zim scanned his memory for that incident - which he indeed did recall as having happened most recently, as the Dib pig had muttered.

Zim smiled. He had done it, as he had expected. He had gotten them home, give or take a few hours. Another triumph for the Irken Armada! Losing the futuristic engine was a slight setback, but he still had enough resources in the present time to bring about Earth's downfall.

Zim looked up at Dib, blinked through the haze, and began to chuckle. He saw Dib and his massive head, distorted behind the water bottle he held in front of him, almost like a jar ... It was a look that Zim had seen before, in the year 3000, and the remembrance of Dib's heady fate in the future pleased the Irken to no end.

Steeling his battered body, Zim lay there and laughed out loud, as annoyingly as ever, his drill-like tongue extended in front of him and his eyes shut tight as his whole frame shook with amusement. Gir began chuckling, too, like an amused child, even if he didn't know what the joke was.

Dib looked down, one eyebrow raised, wondering why Zim was racked in such a fit of insane mirth, and finally chalked it up to either Irken insanity or the simple stress of a crash landing. Whatever it was, Zim was sure to be back in class tomorrow, causing more problems for humanity, with Dib Earth's only hope. Their dance would begin a new ...

Dib shook his head as Zim continued to laugh, and laugh, and laugh, oblivious to everything and everyone around him save his amusement. And it didn't look like he would stop anytime tonight, as the sun began to set behind them. Dib scowled.

"You jerk," he said sullenly.

THE END

(Cue "Invader Zim" end theme music and purple credits screen)

_It's been a blast writing this, and I hope it's been a blast reading it. Thanks to everyone who offered their comments, criticism, and story suggestions the last few months, whether I got to work them into my little tale or not. You know who you are ..._

_Invader Zim created by Jhonen Vasquez. Futurama created by Matt Groening & David X. Cohen._


End file.
